TrueNAS Reviews

Summary: All-in-all, I have made a right decision by choosing TrueNAS as my Home/Family data server, and will suggest it for anyone who likes to control a reliable server for its data.

Positive: I've been using TrueNAS Core server for about 4 months now.
It serves a home storage role for me and my girlfriend. Hopefully in the near future, I will persuade our two families to also accept it, so that our valuable data can have the needed care.
This will also allow me to upgrade it, and use much more of what TrueNAS has to offer.

To point out few of the best pros, here they are:
Features
Stability
Hardware compatibility
Open source nature

Negative: Without too much experience in this regard, since it is my first server, I will nevertheless be honest, and admit that after a month, there was no reply to my ticket on the TrueNAS forum.
There really are a lot of resources, but they are scattered across the web, many of them being related to an old, FreeNAS product.
Interface and guides, for better ease-of-use, are the main things that I would like to be improved. Of course, being a community supported version of TrueNAS, that has its real limits. But I believe that community will grow in the near future.

Summary: Try it. You will not regret it. I started over 15 years ago and it has evolved to a great product line.

Positive: Web interface. Easy to use and secure. Mostly the fact that is somewhat agnostic to hardware. Requirements are not crazy bad and it just works.

Negative: Interface can be slow at times and a bit crowded and I wish they had a way to support some hardware other than inter nics.

Summary: Honestly my experience with TrueNAS over the years has been far better than any storage solution I've used at any job. If I had decision making powers I would migrate out NetApp junk to something from ixsystems.

Positive: The stability and data integrity.
Plugins and more recently the Linux branch (Scale).
Docker support.
Growth and constant innovation.

Negative: Network stack can be a little wonky when you have multiple NICs.

Summary: The first thing to note is that TrueNAS is a NAS first and Scale adds additional functionality for Apps and Virtualization. I am certain improvements will be made over time.

Positive: I started using FreeNAS in 2011 to store media and document files. TrueNAS Scale has been a game changer - allowing Apps and hardware passthrough.

Negative: Though I applaud IX Systems work on TrueNAS Scale there is more to do for the Home Labbers out there. Improved App and Virtualization in both capability and reliability would be appreciated. The improvements since TrueNAS Scale's announcement have not gone unnoticed, but there is more work to do!

Summary: Although this a wonderful method of storing data, one does need to follow the minimum requirements when putting together a system. Remember, you can never have too much RAM. I have purchased my first FreeNAS 32 GB RAM, 8 bay, 4 TB drive system that is still running fine and later purchased a TrueNAS 64 GB RAM, 8 bay system and populated it with 8 TB WD Red Pro then set up the system. I am in the process of buying 16 TB drives and upgrading my new system, then I will take the 8 TB drives and upgrade the old system with those drives.

Positive: By using scrubs, I know that drives going bad can be spotted early, and it can be replaced and insure that data is preserved. Before getting this system, I had photos that were ruined by bit rot (it developed a color stripe down the middle) that I could not correct in Photoshop.

Negative: This is not a backup solution! ZFS running on BSD will let you do stupid things with the setup, so go to the TrueNAS forum to check what you are about to do to insure no self inflicted injuries! I have my systems set up as RAIDZ2. RAIDZ2 allows the failure of 2 disks before data loss occurs. That does not mean you can leave it with 1 dead drive and fiddle around to replace the bad drive, but in case another drive goes belly up while the re-silvering process (rebuilding process for the replaced drive) you are still covered. I know of people who where rebuilding RAID5 arrays have had another drive die during the re-silver process and have lost everything.

Summary: I've been using TrueNAS scale for about 1 year now. It's been rock solid, no issues. I use it as a development server as well as media (jellyfin) and I really have no complaints.

Positive: Fast and stable.
zfs configuration via user interface is very useful.
Reliable reporting.
Easy to setup app/charts.

Negative: User interface design isn't ideal, specifically setting up the charts/apps.

Summary: Good GUI, good support, good speed, good everything really.

Positive: Good ZFS File system, amazing communities.

Negative: TrueNAS is built for commercial systems, which may be limited in terms of hardware a user can use.

Summary: Excellent since it is free as there are no expectations other than the normal ones you would get with a free product. You see I could go on a bit about the whole thing, but that would not be the entire tale worth telling.

Positive: Fast, free and formidable. I currently cannot thing of more words that start with f. Fabulous? Fancy? Fantastic, thats it!

Negative: Nothing to see here folks other than a feeble attempt to leave a wordy review... I am a little embarrassed because I am meandering down the river of mindless speech.

Summary: An excellent solution to safe storage needs. When I started my journey with TrueNAS is was with TrueNAS Core - an implementation based on FreeBSD. As a newbie it was a fairly easy project to get working. I wanted to run a few third party apps so changed to TrueNAS Scale which supported containers and was based on Linux. Effectively, I disconnected the storage, installed the new OS on a few SSDs and finally reconnected the storage and uploaded a config file. It just worked - a rare thing these days.

I trust it with a lifetime of my documents, photos and video memories.

Positive: Reliability - works and keeps on working
Documentation - useful as a reference and to learn from
Support - responsive and professional
Flexibility - lots of configuration options for raid arrays, single disks etc.
Capability - efficient high speed operation Many 3rd party apps may be run in Kubernetes containers for even greater capabilities.
Just Great!

Negative: ZFS has no defragmentation capability. Not sure how important that is - but I believe it would be a speed and efficiency improvement.

When an array is running out of space, one can add another disk to it and gain more storage, but the result is apparently slightly less than an array created with that number of disks in the first place.

TrueNAS can run a large number of applications. Some are provided by iX-Systems and many more by a partner group called TrueCharts. Better documentation on the configuration of these apps would be very much appreciated. The saving grace is that support for the apps significantly helps close the documentation gaps.

Summary: Excellent server. I have no complaints which is rare ! :) I have been using TrueNAS for several years and it rarely needs any maintenance. It simple works and keeps working. Try it for yourself, simply download the ISO, load it into a VM or an old computer and have fun. You will be amazed at how much it can do.

Positive: They have a free version so you can play with it and learn how to use it effectively. Works well even with minimal resources. Even if you put it on an old computer to work as a home server, it works very well.

Negative: Really I don't know of any cons to TrueNAS it works great for what I do.

Summary: Will continue to use until compelled to use something else for all the reasons I stated above.

Positive: Free, ZFS, dashboards and connectivity to other tools like Grafana.

I have multiple drives and continue to use an old chassis. You can build I out as expensive or budget.

Negative: Nothing I can think of at the moment. Can you think of anything.

Summary: I've been Using TrueNAS / FreeNAS for a VERY long time...over a decade. Very happy with the product. In fact, I've never EVER lost data. A lot of people and businesses I know have lost data with even traditional hardware RAID. Not once with TrueNAS.

Positive: Data redundancy.
Ease of use.
Plugin architecture.
Scalable.
Enterprise grade.
Supportable, with a very large community base.

Negative: I wish it still had enclosure support, as well as MPIO support.

Summary: TrueNAS is a professional-grade product made available to those who want full control of their storage solution.

Positive: Very sophisticated interface -- a big step up from my old FreeNAS box and head and shoulders above other commercial NAS products I have used.

Negative: Occasionally TrueNAS loses its connection after an update.

Summary: Good, very reliable. Normal for it to be up for months at a time only going for a reboot when i update.

Solid performance on core, haven't tried scale - though it may solve my driver issue.

Positive: lots of resources for it and easy NAS setup, playing with vm's is fun and better than i expected from a NAS.

Negative: Non-NAS parts are bit more tricky, vLANs are glitchy on my install - apparently a driver issue with my built in ethernet.

Summary: Great product and very easy to install and admin. The well thought out UI makes using ZFS for storage very simple. There is plenty of documentation available and a lot of free user support in forums and other places online.

Positive: Dead simple install.
All the features of ZFS.
Great UI.
Automatic upgrades have worked flawlessly so far.

Negative: I don't like that it uses k8s for virtualization. I wish it used something lighter, like plain old docker or one of the variants.