I am building a new NAS ( I currently have 3), and wanted to know if I should move to Scale or continue to use Core. I have had no issues with Core, it’s a solid as a rock (hope I didn’t just jinx myself) but it looks like it possibly might be EOL? The NAS is used for archiving my Music, Movie and Picture library.
Thanks
Jerry
TrueNAS Core is in “Maintenance Mode” and no further major updates are being planned. You are advised to use TrueNAS Scale instead. (See TrueNAS Documentation Hub ) One of the services that is used to run apps in CORE, jails, has not received an update in over five years. On the other hand, TrueNAS Scale uses Docker containers which has a healthy ecosystem of apps.
If you are using Plex as your media service provider, the migration from FreeBSD in Core to Debian Linux in Scale means that you can use a feature called “Sonic Analysis”. That feature was not available in the FreeBSD because the module was not available on FreeBSD.
If you have multiple NVME slots, I recommend using one for the boot drive, and the others in a mirror mode. I just installed two 1 TB mirrored NVMesin my TrueNAS 25.10 system and migrated my apps from the HDDs to the NVMEs, and apps are much faster, especially Audiobookshelf and Plex.
Thanks for the quick response!! I don’t use Plex, I just copy the movies I want to an external hard drive, connect that drive to the router and use VLC to play it with on my FireTV stick.
Oooo I see the error of my thinking. I just bought a WD Blue hard drive for the OS, not thinking of mirroring the drives. Maybe on my next upgrade.
Any idea if TrueNAS 25.10 will recognize the RealTEC 2.5gB NIC on the motherboard? I know that TrueNAS Core will not. I’m using a Gigabyte Z790 UD-AC, Z790 UD-AX and Z790 Arorus Elite X WiFi7. I ended up getting some Intel NIC’s.
Thanks again for your input.
Jerry
OS and storage drives are separate. You’ll want a small NVMe or SATA SSD as your boot drive (128GB probably the smallest you can buy), any number of HDD for your main storage (if bulk media storage, 4-wide raidz1 or 6 to 8-wide raidz2 are popular), and a two-drive mirror of SATA or NVMe SSD for apps and VMs, if you are going to use those.
I recently switched from Core to Scale. My main reason was that I had additional applications, such as Plex, that were no longer being updated for FreeBSD and I wanted some new features that were not available in their FreeBSD versions.
That said, my Core system was reliable and I had no issues with it. If it were me, and the priority is file storage and backup, it would not be in a hurry to switch an existing Core system to Scale. However, if I were building a new system then I’d use Scale. Also, I like the GUI in Scale better.
Note: I’m using Scale 25.04.2.6
if you are just using it as a file server, either will work and I would stick to Core - that’s precisely what I’m doing when i retired my main (Core) server to a backup server.
