TrueNAS vs Unraid - Which one is the BEST NAS OS for my HomeLab

Which is the best NAS operating system to use at home and in your HomeLab? Is it Unraid for maximizing storage efficiency? Or is it TrueNAS for bringing enterprise ZFS to home? Let's find out.

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00:00 - Intro
01:11 - The Rules
01:27 - Price
02:26 - Hardware & Installation
03:44 - User Experience
05:41 - Storage
08:41 - File Sharing
09:30 - Apps & App Store
13:03 - Virtualization
14:20 - Performance
16:05 - Hardware Passthrough
17:42 - Metrics & Reporting
18:46 - Final Thoughts

Thank you for watching!

[TechnoTim]

After releasing this video I quickly realized what these types of video do, they divide people and that was not my intention. I went into this naively thinking that it would bring people together. I did spend a lot of time researching, testing, and putting this video together and didn't know where it was going to take me. For those that don't agree with me, or other comments, that's actually great! I ALWAYS want to hear other opinions and I welcome those that differ from mine! New ideas and different opinions not only make me a better homelabber, but a better person so thank you!

[days]

I think this video presents a valid point about the state of Unraid today, which is that a lot of features one would expect to be out of the box is actually quite reliant on community developers and plug-ins; things like historical and granular reporting, native backups and snapshots, and a cohesive design language. Watching a new user's experience without all the bells and whistles of the quality of life plugins I've accumulated over the years and I can see where a new user today might be left feeling a bit wanting.

As a user of Unraid for over 8 years, I've loved the simplicity and easy learning curve when it comes to the OS, especially from a non-enterprise background. It's taught me a lot about linux, containers, vms, networking, everything in between. Seeing some of these features in TrueNas definitely made me wish it was also natively part of Unraid.

[BiGnOsEQC]

WARNING : TrueNas dropped kubernetes support in favor of Docker compose in the next version. This caused TrueCharts to completely drop support of TrueNas SCALE, even on the current version. This has leaved me in a state where I cannot install new apps or upgrade existing ones, despite still being on a version of TrueNas that should still support it.

[hacked]

I use both. One of the key benefits of Unraid is partial survivability past the n+x limit, the ability to use simple data recovery methods on any single failed drive, and even the ability to force recovery of in a greater than n+x situation where a portion of the data on the loss plus 1 drive is partially accessible. Oh and you can also create ZFS pools in Unraid.

[boinayel]

I think that one of the great advantages that Unraid has over any other NAS OS is the shallow learning curve. This lets less sophisticated users, like me, install their own home lab and have the full range of use of all the features available to more pro users. Like Docker containers, VMs and hosting your own services like Immich and Nextcloud. I played with Freenas and then Truenas for a bit and I barely got it to run let alone deploy a container.
Now that my Unraid server is running like it should, I have had the opportunity to learn Docker and how to use a Linux console a nice introduction, in my opinion, to more advanced knowledge.

[Kernelcoffee]

I think it really depends on your use case and what you expect.
One thing I'm looking into for my next NAS with UnRaid is single drive use and spindown. Because ZFS or any raid system, when you need one file, the whole raid is used so it's heat, noise and power usage.
Since UnRaid is basically disk stripping with extra steps, only the disk that contains the file is used.
So if like me your NAS is for storage with single files access and you don't have a need for more than single drive perf then UnRAID looks like a valid choice for my use case.
Otherwise I would go with TrueNAS any other day (as I already have)

[KapitanMokraFaja]

As a user of both (and some qnaps aside), I have to defend Unraid just a little, as some of the cons are not really a cons:
- Having system on small usb drive let's you save one drive which can be critical for some small home users. And the backup of it is set as default during the nightly backups. You can just use it to write a system to new one anytime you want without disk swaps
- system on pendrive also allows you to easily move the system to, for example, vm in proxmox with just a small usb passthru
- ISCSi exists and it's doing great job
- For those who do not keep homelab in separate room, ZFS and constantly spinning drives can be annoying. Due to Unraid specific storage management, some of my disks are actually sleeping most of the time saving energy
- it's much more small system friendly (RAM)
- for years it was a perfect example of easiness in passthrough - just click the device and add. I have no clue what happened but also started to have issues with passing some gpus (nvidia)

[Gragorg]

It seems to me that you are not very familiar with Unraid. For storage you touched on the array setup but not pools. Lots of Unraid user run zpools on unraid and it supports snapshots the same as TrueNas. You also have the option of running a traditional Unraid array making Unraid the clear winner in storage to me. As far as applications templates are stored by the app store on Unraid. Appdata Backup allows you to backup your appdata either manually or on a schedule or if you run a zfs cache which I do you can also take snapshots of your datasets.

[noblebullshark]

For what its worth, I currently have 3 Truenas Scale Machines and a few proxmox machines in my rack. All with different use cases. Now I'm new to the whole "homelab" thing and my background is in construction, but after probably about a week or so of videos from Level1Techs, Lawrence Systems, and you I had gotten pretty comfortable with it and now I would say I'm fairly good with the system. I figured that if I was going to get into something I might as well jump into the deep end and hopefully not have to relearn something else down the line and I couldn't be happier. Now I will admit that with my construction business I was able to "write off" almost all of the cost of the building of the machines because of "office upgrades" since I use them for backup of the business and to host software for managing my company, but as far as out of the box experience I don't think I made the wrong choice. Thanks for all the information you post! Your a real MVP.

[robertboskind]

Ive been using unraid for many years. It still a great choice, but overall, if it was easier to switch my huge array I would probably migrate to truenas. Snapshots and the faster performance are the big ticket items that are tempting me.

[mniswonger]

You can take snapshots of appdata on Unraid if you create a cache pool using ZFS and keep appdata on that cache pool. There's also a Community Apps plug-in that will make scheduled cron jobs to backup appdata to a separate location.

[gyzmoduck]

I've been an unRAID user for several years now. The key is tied to your account and you have the option of doing a cloud backup of your flash drive. So really, you don't lose your config if the flash drive fails.

[nglessner]

Some of the items you mention seem like you didnt give UnRaid a fair shake. I'm backing up my VMs nightly and have hardware pass-through working without much fuss.

That's not to say I'm all in on team UnRaid. Their new subscription model is a non-starter for me (if i hadn't already had a non-subscription license).

[MacVilleLP]

One thing I like on the Licensing part of UnRaid is that is not bound to any Hardware (excluded the USB-Stick). Because you can change the Hardware (Mainboard, CPU, GPU and so on) completely wihtout a need of re-deploy the Container or VMs aslong you have the same drives (HDD/SSDs/Nvmes) installed the System boots and is running like before.

[mfadetoblack]

I am sure it's already been mentioned but the next version of TrueNas will allow for adding drives to a pool, FINALLY. So flexibility is coming.

[jankroh]

Maybe you should take some energy measurements as well. I choose Unraid because of its ability to send harddrives individual to sleed whem the are not longer needed. Other than in a typically raid only the drive where the file i want needs to spin up. Every file will always stay on one harddrive.
This is also the reason for many why they use a cpu with integrated gpu instead of a dedicated gpu. In a land like Germany energy costs are quite expensive and for that reason i choose Unraid.

[Demios]

For me, TrueNAS. I don't need all the features TrueNAS provides so I run it in proxmox. I'm well aware that proxmox and do zfs out of the box, but I prefer using the features TrueNAS provides for monitoring my drives over proxmox's meager options.

[jamieficken]

You can add iSCSI in UnRAID through a Plugin.

You can also create ZFS arrays alongside the UnRAID array in UnRAID which makes it more flexible than TrueNAS. The downside is that the UnRAID ZFS array implementation doesn't have a nice GUI (yet) to manage snapshots and other aspects of the ZFS array.

I like UnRAID for home use, however, I wouldn't use it for business use either.

[levelnine]

Dashboard top right the green lock you can adjust or delete everything

[mr.hughes]

Click the green lock icon on the upper right of the stats page in unRAID to customize. Took me a while of digging for that one but it's pretty simple. I have been on the fence for a while, using UR at the moment but don't take advantage of the array. I have one parity and one drive to make UR happy then ZFS pools for the rest, probably going back to TNS now for the data integrity. Thanks for your efforts even though you are getting some flack from seasoned UR users, if you drove it for years like TN they still wouldn't be happy.