UNRAID vs TrueNAS – Which is the BEST NAS OS? 5+ Years Experience

I first built a FreeNAS system nearly a decade ago now, and I built my UNRAID system almost exactly five years ago (genuinely, by the time this video comes out it’ll be within a week of being exactly five years), so I figure with all that experience under my belt, it’s worth taking a look at the two NAS operating systems I still use now so I can hopefully help you decide which is right for you. First, the basics. Both UNRAID and TrueNAS are NAS, or network attached storage, operating systems, and both have been around a fair while, although TrueNAS has changed a lot since I first started using it a decade ago, and it’s important to understand why so you pick the right version. 

TrueNAS is actually pretty new, especially the Scale version I use. It once was FreeNAS, a FreeBSD based NAS operating system with the core storage technology, at least from version 8 and onwards, being ZFS. We will come back to the storage technologies in a minute because those are possibly the most important part here and I really don’t want to miss anything there. FreeNAS was adopted by iXsystems pretty early on – 2009 specifically, only four years on from the initial creation, although they kept it on FreeBSD and under the FreeNAS name until 2020 when they migrated to TrueNAS. This 2020 launch is actually really important as FreeNAS, the FreeBSD based operating system became “TrueNAS Core”, while a new Linux based OS was branded “TrueNAS Scale”. iXsystems have since phased out TrueNAS Core, only offering “TrueNAS Community Edition”, which is just a feature-locked version of TrueNAS Scale. If you are an enterprise user, you can pay them an undisclosed amount of money for the enterprise version, but for us home gamers the community edition is plenty fine, and is totally free, and open source. For the FreeBSD diehards, you can use XigmaNAS, which is the unofficial continuation of FreeNAS. 

As for UNRAID, that is arguably a more professional option at least up-front. You have to pay for it – shock horror I know, but as someone who has paid for it, I can’t say I regret it – with their licensing model now being: “Starter”; “Unleashed”; and “Lifetime”, with the first two only coming with one year of updates (all updates, not just major feature releases), and the latter being free lifetime updates. Starter limits you to 6 drives in your array, and you can optionally pay $36 per year for ongoing updates if you pick the cheaper option. At just $49 for the starter version, that isn’t bad – and $249 for Lifetime isn’t bad either. It’s worth adding that I bought my license before this change, so I have UNRAID OS Plus, which was $89 for 12 drives and there was no limit on updates. I’m grandfathered in to get lifetime updates, although I think I can upgrade to the newer Lifetime license for a discounted price, not that I need to as I only have six drives in there at the moment with room to literally double it if I need. UNRAID is also Linux based.

Right, history lesson done, let’s start comparing! To be clear, I’m talking about TrueNAS Scale/Community Edition here, not Core or FreeNAS. One other caveat, I haven’t updated UNRAID in a while as an update bricked the server a while ago and I use this for work so can’t afford for it to go down, so I might not have access to all the latest UI and features. But hey, at least my uptime is over 6 months, and I think I only rebooted (with over a year of uptime) because my other NAS was flooding my UNRAID box with network traffic… Anyway, let’s start with what I’d argue is the most important part, storage.

UNRAID uses a very unconventional storage solution, effectively software defined storage arrays, storing whole files on individual disks. For context, standard RAID arrays often split files up across multiple disks, both for speed and redundancy, but with UNRAID whole files are kept on a single disk, with some number of parity disks available to ensure the data doesn’t go walkabouts. This is an incredibly versatile solution, as UNRAID does not care what drives you have in your array. You can have a 10TB WD Gold, a 2TB Seagate Pipeline, an 18TB Seagate Exos, and a 4TB IronWolf Pro, and that constitutes a valid array. Now it’s generally a good idea to keep your drives as similar as you can, but you absolutely can use any drives you want. This is actually a really key benefit for us home gamers. If you build a server with four drives, say four 4TB IronWolf’s, but three years later you’ve filled them up and want more, you can stick two 18TB Exos drives in and just expand the array. That’s it, no questions asked. Of course, this method isn’t quite as robust, and doesn’t come with as many protections and features as ZFS. It has flexibility, and some redundancy (through parity disks), but isn’t quite as secure. It does offer a scheduled parity check (which on my six 10TB drive array takes around 15 hours which I do once a month) to make sure none of the data in the array has shifted. When it comes to cache drives, UNRAID’s implementation is a detention cache, as incoming writes get written to the SSD, and are periodically moved to your storage array with a scheduled mover task. That means if you set the mover to move data say once a week, any data you write that week will be available much faster, and it’ll write much faster, because it’s stored in the cache pool. That also means the data is unprotected as it isn’t stored in your array, although you can create even ZFS pools for your cache SSDs so your data is at least somewhat safe there. Importantly, UNRAID doesn’t support TRIM for SSDs in the main array, so it is a horrendously bad idea to use SSDs in the main array on UNRAID. 

TrueNAS, by comparison, has a more traditional storage design – although it’s a stretch to call ZFS traditional. ZFS, formerly zettabyte file system because it could handle zettabytes worth of storage while comparable RAID systems of the time simply couldn’t, is a somewhat unique multi-drive array technology and filesystem all rolled into one. Most file systems are just the data structure and need an underpinning array solution (like hardware RAID) to manage the disks themselves, while ZFS does both the disk management, and the data management, and that means it can control and protect the whole stack much more effectively. With ZFS, and therefore TrueNAS CE, you create VDEVs (virtual devices) out of your pool of drives – ideally like-for-like drives, with some number of parity disks. RAID-Z1, for example, has one parity disk and as many data disks as you want. RAID-Z2 has two, and Z3 has three. You can do Z0 if you want to lose all your data, or set it to mirroring to literally duplicate your data (and cut your usable storage space in half). ZFS has built in data protections that include silent error correction, or as it’s often called, “self-healing data”, by doing error checks when reading data out of the array and correcting errors instantly. There is also an array syncing and integrity check function – ZFS scrub – which is a scheduled task to examine both data and metadata and do its best to repair any corruption. Caches are a little more complicated with ZFS. You basically have two levels, in RAM, and on a second device (like an SSD), with the latter being optional. The first level, on the read side anyway, is called ARC, or adaptive replacement cache, and is one of the reasons ZFS is well renowned to be a RAM hog. On the write side, ZFS uses transaction groups to collate writes together into the more efficient order, and these writes are held in RAM (depending on free space available) while they push the data into the pool. ZFS also keeps write logs to mitigate power loss during transfer losses, which can also mean a lot of RAM usage. Generally you want 1GB per 1TB of storage. You can add an SLOG (secondary log device), which uses ZIL (ZFS intent log) to help speed up and protect data in flight, but unless you are constantly writing a lot, you probably don’t need that. Same goes for the L2ARC, or level two ARC, although you might want to check your standard ARC’s hit rate. If it’s below 90 percent regularly that means you are running out of space to store the ARC data, and could benefit from a cache drive. For most home gamers this isn’t likely to be a problem. There is so much more we could talk about with ZFS, but I’ll finish with snapshots. Snapshots essentially allow you to have backups of changed data, effectively creating incremental backups of your data on-device without needing to actually run a backup. This is an amazing feature that can save your ass without too high a storage cost. 

Moving onto the UI, both interface primarily through web UI’s. Both are kinda similar in the grand scheme of things, especially as both offer a somewhat simple and easy to use route, but have a wealth of advanced settings frighteningly close by. I must admit though that TrueNAS’s share permissions still catch me out. They have a robust security system built in so no one (even you) can access your data unless you explicitly allow it, but that also means you’ve got to set everything up perfectly or you are locked out of your own data. UNRAID has been much simpler to deal with, including accessing your shares. You just go to the users tab and select either read only or read/write for each share for that user. On TrueNAS you need to weed your way through the ACL settings for the share and for the filesystem. I’m still not entirely sure how to do that properly and I’ve been using TrueNAS for a couple years at this point! 

Both, of course, have apps. Only recently has TrueNAS gone the way everyone else has by just using Docker. Now, if you go to the Apps tab you’ll find 340 different apps you can install with a couple clicks – everything from Ollama to Home Assistant is here – although when I say “a couple of clicks”, what I mean is you can get a difficult to understand page with 50 options for user and group IDs, manual storage creation, and CPU and memory allocation. You can just install any Docker container you want though through the “Custom App” option instead. To be fair, at least on my version of UNRAID, installing Docker container ‘apps’ is a similar process. At least the container-specific options are generally pretty clear, and presented to you up-front. I’ve had trouble on both with read and write permissions to my shares, although TrueNAS is definitely a bigger pain in the ass for that. It was worse when it was Jails, now that it’s Docker it’s a lot better. 

UNRAID’s app marketplace – even my less than up to date version – is much more plentiful. I have access to 3051 easy-to-install containers – although it’s worth noting many of those are duplicates. Still, UNRAID’s app interface feels more mature, and a little easier to get to grips with. I understand the TrueNAS interface, and it does have all the features you’d need like one click updates, container shell and logs, but it’s all icons and split apart. Once you work out you can click the app icon to get a menu, everything is there for you. One thing UNRAID has over TrueNAS is plugins, which are applets that integrate directly into UNRAID. Some of those are loosely wrapped existing features like cron jobs (user scripts) which TrueNAS has built in, but some are useful tools like the Unassigned Devices plugin, the Nerd Tools pack, and the Libvirt Hotplug USB plugin. It’s important to note that these all come from the community applications plugin, whereas the TrueNAS apps are all from the built-in library.

When it comes to full VMs, I run a couple through UNRAID and it’s really easy. I did go through the process to see what it’s like on TrueNAS and it’s fine enough – even includes GPU passthrough as a main option! I think one interesting note about UNRAID versus TrueNAS is the system shell. On UNRAID, the button to launch the system shell is right there on the taskbar, and it works exactly as you’d expect. On TrueNAS, you need to go into System, then Shell, then you get a warning about breaking your system. Feels like a bit of an indicator to me on how much each trusts you as the user and owner with your own system. 

Having used both of these for years now, my one liner conclusion for each is this. TrueNAS is the one I’d recommend to home gamers, even if it’s an imperial pain in the ass a lot of the time, and core features are continually subject to change. UNRAID is less reliable for data security, so make sure you have a full backup, but it’s also more refined, endlessly reliable, and I’d argue well worth the relatively little cost for the exceptional stability. UNRAID has been my workhorse system I’ve edited all my videos directly from for five years now, and I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s great. TrueNAS is fine for my personal NAS – having it as my media server (Plex and JellyFin) works great now that they are just Docker containers, and I don’t mind its intricacies when it isn’t mission critical. Those are my thoughts anyway.