StarWind Storage Appliance (SA) vs. TrueNAS

It is well suited in data transfer and storage of files under secure environment. It has contributed to immediate Return on Investment with low cost performance. I totally recommend it to any company for its high speed performance under secure data channels. It does reliable reporting on data integration and analysis on daily basis pointing out areas that have challenging operations.

We have many TrueNAS units deployed and they've served us well everywhere. Our most common use case is using it as storage backing for virtual machines. We have Proxmox talking to it, as well as having it acting as the hypervisor. We've never lost data with it, even when faced with multiple disk failures. We've also always found the performance to be robust and able to handle the needs of our clients. Our clients range from libraries, to medium sized enterprises and we've always been able to make it work, and work reliably.

Incentivized

• Very cost-effective. You choose the hardware.
• Very reliable and performant.
• Excellent proactive support. They call us when there is an issue.
• Very flexible. Can mix and match spinning disk and SSD depending on capacity and performance needs.

Incentivized

• iSCSI Datastores for virtualization.
• NFS store for unix storage or backups over networking.
• Very fast performance, sometimes outclassing SSD arrays even in NFS.
• The ZFS filesystem has given use much greater flexibility.
• Using their newer servers we could in theory scale to any height of required storage.

• Not sure what improvements are needed. The UI could possibly be more intuitive.

Incentivized

• more graphical interface to admin features like plugins, jails, list are well but a tiles aproach will be better
• allow bulk upload/download/update to Groups or user accounts from SMB shares.
• some script language template featured to create/config/change/delete storage pools /dataset or shares .

The software has been amazing. It has saved me a lot of headache in the past few years. Also, it's nice to knowing that if any of our current Synology devices were to die I can have an iSCSI system up and running very shortly. I didn't give a 10 score because I find their support to be rather slow and pedantic. They test many things when the answer is right in front of them. The compute sytem (not storage) we purchased from them came with pcie gen4 nvme's. They didn't work, but rather than believe me about the spec's in the motherboard manual saying the onboard was pcie3 ONLY they shipped me 2 replacements until I showed them an old pcie3 device worked just fine. The part that rather frustrated me was the machine was claimed to have been tested / burnt in. How can this be true if the server won't even boot up into the BIOS?

The software is fairly straight forward and if you mess up the network interfaces you can login locally at the console and fix any issues that you may have had with VLANS etc denying you network access. There was a little bit of annoying issues when setting up multiple network interface cards. Rather than keeping one interface setup with DHCP, when you add a second one with a new network it disables the first. Which makes it impossible to login again. However if you wait it will revert. I learned after works that you need to set up the network cards and then go back and setup the first one again and THEN test / apply. After that it was pretty good. The summary of the devices is very nice to. You get an accurate snapshot of how well your system is doing as soon as you login

The support was responsive for opening cases. However I found solutions to simple problems took far too long. When we had a bad power supply and we had another with the exact same firmware version they should have sent replacement for both. We had to file another case for the other PSU that started dyeing the same week. They also had to do a lot of troubleshooting to replace the fans that were not behaving as they should. I'm not a home user. I know when certain things are failing and the silly hoops the jump through made it frustrating. However, once we finally got the problem identified we had parts shipped out via advance replacement which was nice.

The implementation went well after we got the boot drive working properly. The device was setup exactly as i asked with the hardware except for the boot drive. The reason I chose 9 instead of 10 was the boot drive put us back about a week for the part to arrive. I ended up using a personal drive to show them that they were wrong sending use the gen4 drives.

I have not been able to work with same featured product in our organization, however the performance of this platform has been excellent. The support center has been reliable and trustworthy giving us 100% support on daily basis when we deach them. It is affordable to any business enterprise that is ready to implement data storage and transfer programs. The maintenance and scalable cost is reasonable and and the services has been great.

I chose TrueNAS (upgrading from FreeNAS) because of the small footprint, ease of use, and reliability of the ZFS file system. The file sharing protocols supported as well as the intuitive interface all make TrueNAS a great choice for business and hobbyists alike.

• It enabled us to upgrade our storage and switch from FC to iSCSI at a reasonable cost.
• iSCSi is so much less expensive to maintain.
• StarWind is upgradable and you never lose your investment.

Incentivized

• Using a TruNAS integrated solution has reduced support overhead compared to using custom hardware.
• Being cheaper than full flash storage arrays, this unit allows for a good balance of speed with its use of SSD-based caching drives.
• The reliability of the hardware/software integration means I spend less time troubleshooting and more time doing business. Coming from a custom-built solution it is apparent that IX Systems has done some extensive testing.