TrueNAS Reviews

Overall very easy setup with some minor hiccups. Nothing google couldn’t resolve. Once it’s setup also it works and runs like a charm.

Relatively straightforward to setup with some valuable plugins. The UI is very nicely laid out. Tutorials are pretty easy to follow along with.

Initially understanding pools and jails wasn’t super straightforward during the initial setup but that was pretty quickly cleared up with some reading.

Overall, using ZFS has been great and I currently use and manage several TrueNAS servers for varying purposes including file shares and as an iSCSI datastore for a VMware cluster.

TrueNAS is an excellent system for a central storage server. It can serve as both a file server and central virtualization storage all running on the underlying ZFS filesystem. Great performance and reliability. Web interface makes management of ZFS far simpler than configuring it through a cli.

Expanding storage can be a little costly with ZFS due to the need to add groups of disk matching the existing configuration at once and not individual disks, but that is a limitation of ZFS and not TrueNAS.

Would recommend without hesitation to everybody who needs a NAS. Self build/ hosted or using the possibility to buy via TrueNAS itself.

The sheer customizability of the OS while using it on my HP Microserver Gen8 including the possibility to use Docker containers.

TrueNAS indeed has a steep learning curve, but thats not really a problem, as the documentation and forums are helping.

Has been good overall. Meets my needs. Easy to use, great support. Frequent updates and has been very reliable.

Easy to setup, lots of support, big user community to get help from and instructional you tube videos, works with very wide range of technology.

Not so may plug in options. Samba support used to be a bit flakey but pretty good in v13.

There is a reason its my preferred storage. I've used Compellent, EMC, Pure, VSAN, Promise and others, but TrueNAS is my go to solution for storing data.

Rock solid implementation of just about any storage protocol you want. Complete flexibility with disk/pool options as well. Grow a pool/array, simple replication to offsite storage vendors or other TrueNAS boxes. The pricing is also awesome!

So far, I don't really have anything negative to say. I've been using the product for a very long time and if I could complain about anything, it would probably be that on occasion I have to watch one of the numerous youtube videos they have when it comes to configuring something. I suppose that's not really a negative so much as it is a positive as it concerns to their documentation and videos showing how things work, but whatever ;)

Love it.

Ease of use.
Very reliable.

Nothing.

A good system for a home NAS or enterprise hardware. Based on your knowledge you can do more or less simple things.

Easy and stable solution to use in a small system or in a enterprise environment. With the linux based version there are a lot of plus.

The linux-based version is still new and some functions may not work properly.

I would recommend anyone who wants/needs a home NAS to first give TrueNAS a try. I love it and have used it for many years.

For a home user - it has free open versions. I have just moved to TrueNAS Scale for the improved virtualization as I use TrueNAS first as a NAS and secondly as a VM host.

It has a learning curve - but is well worth it. I could have purchased a Synology NAS, but then I have noticed they have had security issues.

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

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

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

Great product for the features offered. I use it for personal use too. Plex Media Server is excellent.

I use TrueNAS Core for my Business storage.
It's fast, has great features and excellent add-ons.
Community Forums and assistance is fantastic.
Plex Media Server works great.
OpenVPN connectivity works great.

Tech documentation can be very detailed and sometimes hard to follow and need to refer to the Community forums. They are excellent with a good source of information and great user base to assist in the problem solving.

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.

- 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

- 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.

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

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

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

Very well designed software, good selection of futures for any taste. Maybe need some time to polish it and make it really easy to use.

Powerful.
Flexible.
Features.
Containers.
Powerful filesystem/volume manager.
Very good visual interface.

Can offer different filesystem (if user want it so much).
Interface can be cleaned up a bit.
Contextual help may improve the end user experience.

I used it when it was called FreeNAS. Since then the updates went flawless. It took even years why I need a update. Not for the working of it all, for the security it seems.

You turn it on, and it works. It works for days and days and so one. It is like switching a lightbulb-switch.

If I see a feature that seems to work for me, installing it with all the parameters is difficult for me. There are questions that has no ringing bells for me. Even looking at several YouTubers.

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.

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

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

Good overall. Very robust and not so difficult to configure and use. You have to familiarize with the ZFS file system, which is very different to the usual ones, but once you understand the basics it is very powerful.

Very powerful and very easy to install.
It gives professional capabilities even for a home do it yourself system even with cheap or old hardware elements.

It lacks a native way for controlling the fans of the system.
It would be great to have an complete fan and temperature controlling system in the dashboard.
For a datacenter is not so important, but for small offices, noise of the fans is relevant.

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!

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.

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... 😘

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

Good ZFS File system, amazing communities.

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

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

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.

The fact that some applications have to run in jails.

Perfect. I am running it on a 5 year old server as a media box and couldn't be happier. I advise using ECC Ram for extra safety but it is not a hard requirement.

TrueNAS is an amazing product. It allows you to run and administer a NAS with the ease of a home user product but provides reliability in line with industrial grade servers.

You can run it on just about any hardware and the learning curve is less than a week. If you are a Unix user, it is less than a day! Best of all the ZFS files system provides ultimate data security so you can feel safe.

It is truly hard to find any negatives, but I will try, so here goes: I am not overly fond of the UI Themes and feel bored to customise them. There. :-)