TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

FreeNAS

Score5.5 out of 10

24 Reviews and Ratings

Get a Demo

What is FreeNAS?

FreeNAS is an open source operating system that allows nearly any hardware serve as a network-attached storage device. It was developed by iXsystems.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about FreeNAS.
View all reviews

A great tool for our legacy application and systems.

Incentivized
eldhose k shibuView profile
Chief Technology Officer (Consulting) in Engineering at RightVows Job Store (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company uses FreeNAS to support our legacy systems, which were implemented long before, although FreeNAS is now officially TrueNAS, We still use FreeNAS in our on-premises system (legacy). Since it is based on BSD it has all the functionalities that FreeBSD has to offer. The performance capability of FreeNAS is really amazing it still continues to operate on our legacy systems with minimum tolerance. Also since the porting of FreeNAS to TrueNAS is really easy, it also gave us an advantage for us.

Pros

  • Highly Flexible.
  • Simplified UI and ease of usage in volumes.
  • Efficient storage management.
  • Secure and reliable in legacy systems.

Cons

  • Initial installation is a hassle.
  • Really difficult in switching between RAID storages.
  • Support for free version is very limited.

Most Important Features

  • Backing up of data.
  • Secure storage of files.
  • Effective utilization of network resources.

Return on Investment

  • As it is free and open-source, we need not spend much except when we require support.
  • Really works well still, so we have infinite ROI.
  • handled all the network resources effectively.

Alternatives Considered

FreeBSD, Ubuntu OpenStack and Debian OS

Other Software Used

Ubuntu OpenStack, FreeBSD, Debian OS, CentOS Linux

FreeNAS: The best OpenSource NAS service

Incentivized
Pranay Jain
Senior Consultant in Information Technology at GeeksRadar (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

First of all, FreeNAS is now rebranded as TrueNAS core. We are using it for our legacy applications which are running on-prem in a local network. TrueNAS is based on FreeBSD and it's free to use with all the core features. The best part is we can switch to TruNAS enterprise in just one click which we did for some of our installations.

Pros

  • OpenSource and Free to use.
  • Supports multiple redundancy configurations.
  • Great UI with 360 degree view of the system.

Cons

  • Not good for beginners as it requires deep understanding of networking and storage.
  • Most of the good and required features are not available in free version.

Most Important Features

  • Open Source Software.
  • Can be used with Old system as it's based on Linux.

Return on Investment

  • It's free to use so ROI is infinite.
  • Great learning experience for team.

Other Software Used

SUSE Rancher, Linode, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

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

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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!

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Most Important Features

  • Open-source.
  • Support for a wide range of network protocols.
  • ZFS storage for top-class data integrity.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Other Software Used

Debian OS, Ubuntu Linux, Proxmox VE, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, macOS, Fedora Linux, CentOS Linux, CentOS Stream

Freenas, the best great free NAS solution

Incentivized
Chris ThibeauView profile
Technical Support Analyst in Information Technology at Nova Scotia Provincial Gov (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • The FreeNAS web interface is modern looking. It makes tasks like provisioning drives into raid volumes easy.
  • The ZFS raid option allows you to add in an SSD as a cache drive to increase performance.

Cons

  • I found it hard to set user specific security options on shares.

Return on Investment

  • Backing up FreeNAS is not simple, as it does not have a built-in option to backup.

For both home and business, so powerful!

Incentivized
Tommy BoucherView profile
IT Director in Information Technology at Coveo (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • RAIDZ, fast and simple, and reliable.
  • SSD Caching, for both Read and Write.
  • Many services, from FileServer (FTP, SMB, WebDAV, ...), including iSCSI, and many other available using jail
  • Powerful UI, easy to monitor, and manage.
  • Awesome community, with many improvements every build.

Cons

  • Deduplication. The deduplication uses so much RAM, and makes every write very slow. I have a very powerful server, with 128 GB of RAM, and when enabling deduplication, writes are 50% slower. Disaster. A Microsoft approach (cron job) using junction would be better, in my opinion...
  • VMs. They have a module for VMs, but, it's a pain. Based on FreeBSD, they should do something to make it work... or provide some images. Tried to make a Windows Server VMs with many tutorials, and can't get it to work.
  • Backup. It is very easy to use FreeNAS as a backup target, but when it's time to backup the FreeNAS itself... not that simple.

Return on Investment

  • Positive - Can be download for free, if you don't need support
  • Negative - The paid support is basic, and requires next business day shipping
  • Positive - Can work on almost any hardware
  • Positive - Powerful caching, can have low latency high IOPS for almost any application using ship hardware
  • Positive - Plugin market with ready to go apps, time saver

Alternatives Considered

QNap, Sinology, Netgear ReadyNAS, HPE StorageWorks, Dell Storage NX, Openfiler, TrueNAS, D-Link NAS and Western Digital My Cloud