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Feb 19, 2025

5 reasons why I use Unraid over TrueNAS Scale

Whether you are building yourself a home server from new components or repurposing old hardware, a NAS is a great project to enhance your home network capabilities. There is a good deal of choice when

Whether you are building yourself a home server from new components or repurposing old hardware, a NAS is a great project to enhance your home network capabilities. There is a good deal of choice when it comes to NAS operating systems and what you choose to go with will surely be something you’ll need to live with for a very long time.

Before committing to a NAS long term, you should first carefully evaluate your options, grab yourself a copy of the TrueNAS Scale and a trial of Unraid. As a long-time Unraid user, I often get asked why I prefer Unraid for my needs to the more conventional RAID based operating system TrueNAS Scale, so let’s dive in.

Unraid is a solid operating system for DIY NAS setups, but I still belong to the TrueNAS Scale faction

When I decided to build a NAS many years ago, I wanted a system which would give me maximum flexibility with drive configurations. One of Unraid’s major advantages is that you can mix and match different drive sizes into an array. Unraid allows me to expand or even shrink my storage capabilities with any size drive as and when I want to. I don’t have to worry about matching the drive sizes or deciding from the start how big my array will be.

This unfussy approach to adding storage to my server has allowed me to build out my NAS over time. As an example of this, when I began with my system, it consisted of fewer, much smaller drives. Over time, larger hard disks became available and more affordable, allowing me to adopt larger drives into my array while keeping my older, smaller drives until they needed to be replaced with larger variants.

TrueNAS Scale does not currently allow for such easy organic growth by simply adding another drive here and there and incorporating it into the array.

The biggest selling point for me remains that Unraid continues to allow me to upgrade the capabilities of my server storage systems without significant technical headaches. The flexibility in this storage configuration has allowed my system to grow significantly in capabilities over time while not having to incur significant upfront costs or requiring me to rebuild my array to allow for a larger array.

There is a lot to be said for running a home server using RAID. The inherent distribution that comes from striping data across the entire array can allow for stunning performance and resilience if it’s done right. TrueNAS offers exceptional RAID capabilities, and if you plan ahead and execute it properly from the start with enough drives, no doubt you’ll have a brilliant experience.

When it came to my own requirements for building a storage array, I naturally wanted some form of data resilience. RAID is fantastic as long as you’ve scaled your array from the start to allow for a high degree of failure with multiple drives. This requires a good number of disks and there can still be a chance that too many drives will fail to provide the parity to recover any data at all.

My needs for data resiliency are a bit of a mixed bag. I have a lot of data stored on my array but the majority of it is data I can get again. For example, I have a ton of music purchases downloaded to my home server which can simply be re-downloaded again from the sites where I bought them. It is very time-consuming to re-download things in the event of an outright failure, but not the end of the world. I also have a physical offsite backup of this data, so hopefully, it will never need to happen.

Unraid does, of course, give you resilience in drive failures through the use of a dedicated parity drive or multiple parity drives and it works well. I have recovered from multiple drive failures on a number of occasions without any issues at all.

Rather than striping the data across all drives, Unraid writes your files to the drives in a fairly sequential fashion, filling up each of the drives in a distributed way. Why this is appealing to me is that if there are catastrophic failures of drives and parity, the data remaining on the other drives will be easy to recover by simply plugging each drive into any Linux machine and copying off the data. For a RAID array, I’d need to be able to rebuild it with enough parity or lose it all. With Unraid, you’d at least be able to recover data from every drive which hadn’t failed, and that is just handy and convenient.

If your NAS is running out of space or has a dead drive, here's how you can install a new one

Unraid disk performance is slower than TrueNAS. This one comes up quite a bit when people are talking about Unraid vs. TrueNAS. Unraid as discussed does not stripe data across all the drives, this means you’re only getting the speed of a single drive when reading and writing data. A RAID array will use every disk in your array in combination to provide great read and write performance.

While this may seem like a clear dealbreaker, the reality is that I simply don’t need disk performance like this for the fairly static data I use on my main array at home. Sure, it would be nice to have, but as Unraid allows separate cache pools of fast storage, it’s easy to put the right workload on the correct storage. And by correct I mean an SSD or NVMe drive.

Almost all Unraid installations are likely to include some form of SSD or NVMe drive for the specific purposes of providing a fast cache for apps and VM’s. In my case, I have shifted all applications, fast access shares, and virtual machines onto high-performance SSD cache pools. The data from these pools is then periodically backed up to the spinning disks. This gives me both high speed access and automatic duplication onto the main spinning disk array.

As a home user, I am happy to forgo array level performance across the board to get a system which is easier to expand and manage over time. Where I do need superfast disk performance, I utilize the SSD cache drives in my Unraid server.

With a NAS, it’s not all about disk resilience and performance, it’s also about the apps and services you’ll be running on top of it all. Unraid has a very healthy community of developers creating docker apps for the platform.

If there is an app or service you require, you’ll have almost no problem finding even the most obscure app to use in Unraid. While TrueNAS Scale will do just fine with the more popular apps, you may have issues finding absolutely everything you can think of.

As well as traditional apps, Unraid also allows community developers to create enhancements for the operating system in the form of plugins. I have covered many of these in my earlier Unraid article, but these are designed to actually bring new functionality to the user experience. The community app store currently has over two thousand apps to use alongside around two hundred plugins.

Right from the earliest days of Unraid, there has been a strong focus on creating an active community through their dedicated forums. The result of this is that you can tap into many years of articles and posts covering all the questions and concerns you might have. As the operating system and apps have changed fairly little over the years, even the oldest resources can be adapted for learning purposes.

Well, actually there can be many and the choice is great. We're lucky to be comparing two outstanding NAS operating systems. The storage flexibility, ease of use, and the vast range of apps available for Unraid mean it’s a great fit for anyone looking to build a NAS. Unraid isn’t free, of course, but for the price of the license, you’re getting platform updates alongside the potential to save money on your upfront storage hardware costs. TrueNAS Scale will hopefully soon allow for a more flexible approach to adding storage in the future. Until then, Unraid continues to be my personal choice and recommendation for a majority of home users who intend to set up a long-term storage and app server.

We want to hear from you! Share your opinions in the thread below and remember to keep it respectful.

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ZFS has much higher data integrity than Unraid, every block written to each element of the disk pool is checksummed and timestamped so it can resolve issues with inconsistent data after power failures and such, including events like the cat tripping on the power cord out of the UPS.

I've been running TrueNAS Core since it was FreeNAS, my zpool was initialized in 2012, and its never lost or corrupted a record. I've replaced the disks twice since then with larger ones (3->8->16TB). My Microserver only holds 4 disks so I can't just add drives. but its very low power and quiet so I like it.

ZFS support on Unraid is now officially there too if that's your bag

TrueNAS Scale 24.10 adds support for zfs expansion (adding disk to existing zpool and zraid), also truenas is all docker, with support for compose yml files.

Interesting, I see extending a RAIDZ vdev in the notes, is that what you mean?

The comments are interesting on this...

I've been using FreeNAS/TrueNAS Core/Scale for over 10 years and have >1PB of usable storage in TrueNAS pools. I've never used Unraid. Clearly, I prefer TrueNAS.

However, I felt the article was fair and accurate. I wonder if the comments are why someone labeled the TrueNAS community as toxic.

The reasons in the article are exactly why I recommend Unraid to most people. It's much more flexible. The performance is 'good enough' for home use. It's more difficult to lose all your data. RAIDZ expansion is NOT equivalent to Unraid expansion. Finally, they can still use a ZFS pool within Unraid if they want faster or more reliable storage for their data.

Thanks for reading and providing your honest experience with TrueNAS. I too was a little surprised at some of the comments, but passion comes in all forms!

Both are great NAS operating systems. 1PB storage sounds epic, you must have quite the setup. Well done!

All the reasons making Trunas hero and more capable and organized can be adopted to enterprise.

While unraid is for the home users who would pick the drives from dead pcs and use it and calling it a nas.

you forgot to mention they sponsored this article

Didn't forget, it's not sponsored :)

XDA has the most hottest takes away. From "IPv6 = useless" to this, wow.

Seriously feels like a joke at this point.

Well first of all Unraid is not free whereas TrueNAS is open source but still offers an enterprise version with advanced monitoring and support.

And this is completely wrong:

> TrueNAS Scale does not currently allow for such easy organic growth by simply adding another drive here and there and incorporating it into the array.

I had no problems extending my zfs single disk setup to a mirror raid with just one click in the very well done web ui.

Also the community was very understanding and knowledgeable to me as a newcomer, so I'll definitely stay.

It's been chugging along nicely and quietly for the last 7 months now, upgrade to latest 24.10 was no issue, although they swapped out the kubernetes engine for good old docker.

I've just started out with a new build and went with TrueNAS Scale 24.10. My simple reason is the maturity of the project, no cost for the community version, and my biggest concern, running the OS on a USB drive. I'm sure Unraid has merits, but it's not for me.

As others have said, Unraid is not open source and that's a no-no for me, for any critical service. Also I've found the best and most flexible setup Is Proxmox on the host and TrueNAS as a VM: with PCI passthrough there is almost no performance difference compared to bare iron installs, and you have all the features of Proxmox. Add a docker LXC or VM and you have the best possible setup IMHO

I have this setup at home and work.

Sigh.

Annoyed response. I have used unRAID and truenas scale.

unRAID is a simple solution for a simple user. It's very much so a set it and forget it home NAS solution.

I used freenas before unRAID. So when unRAID changed it's licence model I moved back to freenas which was now rebranded truenas scale.

Sigh. Was it a simple transition. No. Is it better than unRAID yes.

ZFS will always be king for me. My ability to control my raid will always be better.

Did unRAID add ZFS... Yes is it a bastard bad implementation in unRAID yes. Do not use ZFS in unRAID.

Where did true nas introduce problems. When presenting storage to containers. That sucked. It sucked a lot. I had to add mount commands to mount samba shares on startup, because the nas did not automatically. Worst feature. And biggest opportunity for improvement.

Still truenas is by far better, if you include the licence changes its miles and miles better.

unRAID shit licence and over priced for less control.

Truenas more complicated and cludgy, but cheaper and more customization.

Reads like you bought Unraid and just need to justify it. I only read the first paragraph and already you're wrong. You can absolutely slap a drive into TrueNas and add it to the zpool.

Looking briefly at the Z pool expansion don't you need to rewrite the entire data to make use of the full capacity?

Unraid let's you take any size disk and add it to the array. The parity is built while the disks are in use.

Add disk, add disk to pool. Profit.

I use zfs. It works too good not to. No point even trying these 2 "solutions"

No closed source project has ever lasted more than 10 years before becoming abandon wear to open source projects. Use the source young Jedi.

I was today years old when I learnt that Unraid has been around since 2005, almost 20 years there. I hear you and do agree, Open is Golden. TrueNAS Scale is shaping up well for sure.

That's hilariously false

The only reason I didn't choose TrueNAS IS because some of its toxic fanbase.

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