What other NAS systems have you tried?

TrueNAS General
1

A long time user here of TrueNAS Core - very happy as well.

But seemed to be a good time to experiment. and I was curious as to what others have tried.

the following is what I have tried so far (on a T7400):

  1. TrueNAS Scale: wouldn’t install :frowning:
  2. fnOS: installed successfully and seemed to be as fast. VM and containers also work.
  3. OpenMediaVault: also worked flawlessly. seemed quite good.

I haven’t spent enough time with each so would be interested in hearing from others as well.

thanks in advance.

2

Haven’t heard of this one.

Can’t stand its UI. Specifically, that every single settings change requires four steps:

  • make the change
  • save the change
  • apply the change
  • confirm applying the change

It’s bad enough that OPNsense requires a separate “apply” step for some settings, but (1) not for all of them, and (2) at least it doesn’t require the entirely superfluous extra step of confirming that you want to apply them. And (and this is really much more important) it doesn’t do ZFS natively, and the add-on for it is very sparse.

Others? Well, I’m only interested in doing ZFS, so that narrows down the options considerably. I used XigmaNAS when it was FreeNAS, but that’s been 15 years ago or so, and I haven’t really done anything with it since. Napp-it does ZFS well, but has a pretty dated UI (it’ll make the old FreeNAS UI look positively modern). But if you want to get your Solaris on, it’s your thing.

Yet others? I’ve played with Synology, it’s pretty, it’s easy to use, but that complexity it hides means it lacks flexibility. And it doesn’t do ZFS.

3

Home user with no IT background here.

I used Qnap and Synology in the past. They are usually easier to use but not always, for example I could not setup SSH backup of my Linux desktop to Synology no matter what I did.

I am a TrueNAS Core user for about 3 years now. I tried once to migrate to Scale but after the initial setup it failed in first reboot, I’ll do it but I am not in a hurry, I use it just for a NAS.
I am not aware of anything else for keeping my data safe without any effort from me.

I use also OpenMediaVault as an easy way to run a few services on Docker (I am a noobe and it was the easier way for me to combine docker compose, SMB shares, rsync etc with a GUI).

4

i really like fnOS: more modern and snappy. runs very well on budget systems.

I have also used manually configured linux systems (debian) and that’s easy as well. no web interface. but you have full control.I can see someone containerize that, like running TrueNAS inside of a proxmox VE.