Unraid vs TrueNAS
Pros and cons
Each system's own strengths and weaknesses, plus the specs where Unraid and TrueNAS differ.
Unraid
Pros
- Mix drives of any size and grow the pool over time
- Apps from the Community Apps store and VMs that can use your graphics card
- Boots from USB, SSD or NVMe
- Mixing drive sizes
- Booting from a USB stick
Cons
- Paid licence, per server
- Proprietary software
- No ARM support
TrueNAS
Pros
- Free and open source
- Detects and repairs corrupted files, with quick snapshots and copies to another machine
- Docker apps and VMs built in
- Being free and open source
Cons
- Drives in a group should match in size
- Needs at least 8 GB of RAM
- Must boot from an SSD or NVMe drive
Unraid vs TrueNAS: specs side by side
Every setting for both systems in one table, from how they pool drives to what they boot from. Values in bold are where one has the edge.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Growing a pool from mismatched drives | Data integrity, snapshots and replication |
| Price | From $49 | Advantage: Free |
| Licence | Proprietary | GPL-3.0 / LGPL-3.0 |
| Based on | Slackware | Debian |
| Apps | Community Apps (Docker) | TrueNAS Apps (Docker) |
| Boots from | Advantage: USB / SSD / NVMe | SSD / NVMe |
| Storage | Parity array or ZFS | ZFS |
| Mixed drive sizes | Advantage: Yes | Each vdev uses its smallest drive |
| Virtual machines | Yes | Yes |
| Architecture | x86 only | x86 only |
| Min hardware | 4 GB RAM | 8 GB RAM |
Updated