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Amazing product that will keep your data safe and always available.
April 10, 2022

Amazing product that will keep your data safe and always available.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with FreeNAS

Our organisation uses FreeNAS (now known as TrueNAS CORE) in a number of ways. We have an instance that operates as an office file server, an instance that provides network storage to our VMs, and another instance that we use for storing archived backups. In all three scenarios, FreeNAS works flawlessly, providing rock-solid storage using ZFS along with SMB, NFS, and iSCSI protocol support for all our networked devices. Also, it does all of this for free!

We've used this for many years, having previously put together our own file servers based on Linux and FreeBSD that worked well but required a lot of admin. The switch to FreeNAS was painless, ultra-reliable, and almost maintenance-free. No complaints here!
  • ZFS storage for top-class data integrity.
  • Wide range of protocol support for networked devices to connect with.
  • Excellent web interface for managing storage, users and general administration.
  • 2 factor authentication for increased security.
  • Driver support is generally very good but could be improved for some more 'exotic' network and storage interfaces (currently limited by what FreeBSD supports, which is slightly more restrictive than Linux).
  • I'd like to see Arm CPU support in the future. This isn't much of an issue at the moment because today's typical Arm devices do not support lots of memory, storage, etc. However, the tide is turning, and Arm devices are only going to increase in popularity, availability, and performance over the coming years.
  • Open-source.
  • Support for a wide range of network protocols.
  • ZFS storage for top-class data integrity.
  • Requires very little maintenance, allowing us to focus resources on other areas of the business.
  • Being free of charge (for TrueNAS CORE versions), it saves us money and allows us to scale up to multiple machines without cost concerns.
  • The ZFS storage provides us with peace of mind that our data is safe, which in turn, keeps our customers happy.
Before swapping to FreeNAS, we'd been using plan old Linux servers running Samba and NFS with ZFS storage underneath. This worked really well for our requirements at the time but required a lot of administration when new versions came along, or new users had to be added or drives needed replacing, and so on. FreeNAS did away with 95% of that work and does a much better job too.

Do you think FreeNAS delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with FreeNAS's feature set?

Yes

Did FreeNAS live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of FreeNAS go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy FreeNAS again?

Yes

FreeNAS is well suited for most storage serving scenarios, whether it be for an office file server, backup destinations, data replication across the internet, or as backend storage for virtual machines. It can serve various types of clients via a plethora of standard protocols and can easily integrate with existing infrastructure using LDAP authentication and so on.

It's pretty simple to use (it helps to have at least a basic understanding of the underlying technologies) and almost maintenance-free.

One scenario that springs to mind that it may not be appropriate for (yet) is as S3 storage. However, S3 functionality was added in a recent release and may have improved greatly since then. I'm sure it will eventually work very well for this.