TrueNAS Reviews

Summary: Coming from using a server OS vs NAS OS adjusting to how it functions in comparison, was somewhat of an adjustment.

Positive: Mainly the ease of use, but the flexibility of the software I also consider somewhat of a plus, the both add to the overall experience.

Negative: The fact that some applications have to run in jails.

Summary: Given the specialized use case in this deployment (backing up multiple Synology units over s3 into independent buckets) this is pretty useful.

Positive: Pretty versatile options for data sharing with SMB, NFS, RSYNC, and S3 options. Pretty good performance available with the addition of metadata vdevs and relatively cheap optane nvme's

Negative: Permissions could be handled better.
The UI could use some additional effort in the look and feel area.

Summary: It's quite great product for not just only home needs but also for enterprise solutions.

Positive: Reliability.
Flexibility.
Price.
UX/UI.
Easy to manage.
Snapshots.
Recovery functionality.
Encryption.
and etc.

Negative: USB external drive support.
Some UX/UI issues.

Summary: The title says it all, I didn't know much about NAS before my experience with Scale, and to be honest i've been blown away by it's ease of use. It has a ton of features which i'm probably never gonna use (at least for now), but the ones I'm using are well documented, and easy to implement. I'm still learning, but overall I feel great about sticking with TrueNAS.

Positive: The initial configuration was a walk in the park.
ZFS is awesome in so many ways!
The Ui in both Core and Scale is clean and organized.
Setting up VM and containers is foolproof.

Negative: It's too soon for me to list cons since i'm so new, the features i'm using work flawlessly.

Summary: - easy to start
- more advanced use-cases need to be developed more.
- Kubernetes doesn't play nice with the Kubernetes-ecosystem by default. It's possible, but not completely supported or as easy as another Kubernetes distro makes it. TrueNAS relies on its interfaces and that's a shame. The 3rd party packages focus more on this, but evolving. I hope this will change in the future.

Positive: - zfs filesystem features are great and stable
- apps/Kubernetes ecosystem is evolving and hopefully will continue to. A lot of apps, but stability of 3rd party updates is something the community should focus on. It's a start currently.
- good alerting
- easy to setup shares with security
- easy backup of base settings for restore

Negative: - alerting interface could be more accessible
- apps-ecosystem

Summary: I've set up two instances fairly quickly with spare parts that I had just layin' about. Still running today.

Positive: Easy to use, plenty of folks online to help, customizing hardware to get the most out of the experience.

Negative: Unable to utilize USB storage, set USB storage to a share.

Summary: TrueNAS is perfect as storage server, but not so good as app server because bad app management system.

Positive: ZFS, stability, easy to learn... Availability to manage both TrueNAS users and SMB users using one common management system is perfect solution.

Negative: CORE - unclear future.
SCALE - bad app management system.

Summary: Excellent. I have been really happy with the performance and features. Many more than I know what to do with. Updates are now seamless and my system is very robust.

Positive: I have been really happy with the performance and features. Many more than I know what to do with. Updates are now seamless and my system is very robust.

Negative: Prior versions were not straightforward to update (FreeNAS).

Summary: Installation and setup was very straightforward and easy. The UI is structured and clear and was easy to use. Creation of a storage pool, volume and share took me just a few minutes. The performance on a mapped network share on windows was very good, even while using very basic PC hardware and just two old SATA HDDs for the NAS. On another system where I used even older hardware one of the drives failed. The resilver was easy and worked just fine. No data was lost.

Positive: Easy installation and setup.
Good performance.
Very reliable.
Good UI.
A lot of protocols and addons supported.

Negative: The gap from a free install to a payed solution with hardware is quite big.
There is no SMB option that is cheap enough to compete with solutions like Synology or QNAP NAS.

Summary: The interface is very good so far, I have explored a small amount and will continue delving into containerised workload solutions.

Positive: Interface is easy to navigate, and online community tutorials are prominent.
Webpage shows a great amount of detail into the product.

Negative: These video/written tutorials could have a centralized place on TrueNAS' website.

Summary: Would actually like to run everything in true as, has been very good for me for the past few years, only once had an issue with a very common hba stopping to be supported after an update, something that could've been my fault since it doesn't make any sense I admit, swapped it out for a cheap one of the jungle site and everything has been going fine since.

Positive: You can do everything with it. Even though it's sold as a NAS solution, out of laziness and power management I have moved everything to run on my NAS.

Negative: You will do everything with it. Since everything at my house now runs on it, I'm weary of the day something dies.

Summary: I had been using the default OS on an ASUStore NAS. It was ok. but very limited as an advanced user (retired IT Admin) it was not going to be acceptable for long. I started looking around and found TrueNAS installable and flashed it to a 1 TB Nvme and never looked back. Thanks to an ix youtube!

Positive: I like that it's stable out of the gate. No tweaking to make it work. It just works! Looking forward to purchasing a TrueNAS mini in my future. I want to grow my TrueNAS Scale with a new device.

Negative: Nothing so far as I am newly converted Synology user. Don't get me wrong, Synology's have been in use here since 2k and still use them for storage. I find that TrueNAS has opened up my LAN possibilities by leaps and bounds to the regrets of my wife... 😘

Summary: i started using FreeNAS since about 9.2. even though its been a rocky start, it was still far more accessible to me than other similar projects.
This project has come a loooong way in terms of reliability, clarity of configuration, and just general spit and polish.
i could not find any other alternative that suited my needs better.

Positive: - reliable
- easy to configure to get essentials up and running (more complex stuff is obviously more complex)
- open source
- at the time of this writing, has a decent company behind it with a great team

Negative: - community support can be somewhat abrasive.
provided documentation is actually of high quality as well.
however if you bump into some edge case, or in a rare occasion the documentation does not mention a bug, and if you are a beginner (or in a pinch) and are not able to sit for days reading through threads to figure out some obscure GUI quirk, and are hoping to find help in a conversation style manner, you're going to have a bad time.
thankfully, ChatGPT has been unveiled just in time.
you no longer need to take a mini crash course in linux networking, freebsd/jails (deprecated anyway), etc. just to get one time configuration right that you will otherwise never have to deal with again.

Summary: Running an enterprise, TrueNAS Scale provides everything that is advisable to have, it really brings to life all the services that are necessary to be considered modern, starting from the data safety.

Positive: I have been using TrueNAS Scale for several months.

It is built around ZFS filesystem, which is currently the best option to keep your data safe in time.

It also ships with tons of useful apps, provided by the community and by other partners.

Negative: It is often a bit difficult to manager and counterintuitive, it is better to be used by proffesionals or at least people eager to learn, like me.

Summary: Very good NAS appliance for home or small business use, I use NetApp and similar devices in my job and TrueNAS offers most of the facilities you actually need at a lower cost.

Positive: Free options available.
Seems reliable.
Good snapshot facility.
Lots of extra facilities available.
Runs under ESXi with few issues.

Negative: Some issues running under ESXi, predominately related to volume errors.