Two TrueNAS servers, one rack — the CORE-and-SCALE split I never designed

Short summary

The author recounts how they ended up with two TrueNAS servers in one rack — CORE on a Dell R630 for Chia/XCH farming with JBOD-backed small ZFS pools, and SCALE on a Dell 740xd (as a Proxmox VM) for Storj, personal NAS, and media. The split wasn't architecturally planned but emerged from workload pivots, hardware constraints like an HBA drive-count ceiling, and whichever server had capacity when a new workload needed to land. The piece is a candid reflection on how homelab infrastructure accretes through years of small decisions rather than clean design.

• •Two TrueNAS servers (CORE + SCALE) in one rack, split by workload history not design
• •CORE handles Chia/MMX farming; SCALE runs Storj and personal storage as a Proxmox VM
• •Architecture shaped by constraints (HBA ceiling, XCH decline) that no longer apply but persist due to migration cost

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