TrueNAS Mini X+ Compact ZFS Storage Server with 5+2 Drive Bays, 32GB RAM, Eight Core CPU, Dual 10 Gigabit Network (Diskless)

My QNAP finally fell victim to ransomware, and so I decided it was time to replace it with something else. Ive read that Synology NASs have also had similar security issues that left them vulnerable to ransomeware attacks. So I pondered the feasibility of throwing together my own solution using open-source software, as it is more likely to have better security. iX Systems TrueNAS Core (formerly FreeNAS) has a great reputation in the open-source community, and Ive been wanting to try it. I really did not want to roll my own NAS, although that is entirely possible with TrueNAS, and so was very glad that iX Systems offers a range of products for the home/small office user community. The Mini X+ is, for me, a serious upgrade over my previous QNAP. Plex transcoding should not be an issue for me if I have other things going on on the device at the same time as well. The Mini X+ itself is very well put together and has an excellent build quality, comparable to Synologys offerings. I am an IT professional and I have extensive experience administrating NetApp, Pure Storage, and Equallogic systems. I will say that the TrueNAS software itself is enterprise class, having many of the same features present in storage solutions that cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Out of the box, TrueNAS supports iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and even s3. One of the features I really love about it is the underlying ZFS filesystem. TrueNAS + ZFS gives you the ability to make snapshots of your datasets, and you have the option of reverting or even cloning the snapshot to a new dataset. This makes file recoveries relatively painless, reducing the need to recover from backup. You do back up your data, dont you? With 5 drives in the mini X+, selecting RAID-Z1 will provide protection for up to a single drive failure. Ive only been using this for a few days now, and the only negative thing I have to say about TrueNAS is that the login to the web GUI is limited to the root account only. It would be nice if iX Systems would, in a future version, allow the ability for other accounts to be able to access the GUI.

Fantastic - zero complaints.

After having heard about iX systems for a while due to their sponsorship of several podcasts, I decided to purchase a NAS from them after doing some research. I contacted them directly since I had a few questions and they provided good answers. While my system was likely small compared to their usual server builds, they were excellent about keeping me informed about the status of my order throughout the delivery process. Im just starting to work with the system now and appreciate the build quality of the machine.

The Mini X+ is a beautiful machine, and perfect my intended use case of reliable home file storage. As an IT professional, Ive come to the conclusion that there is no substitute for ZFS when you want the greatest possible assurance that your data will be preserved intact. And the TrueNAS Mini line is the turnkey solution for ZFS file storage in a small affordable package. I bought the Mini X+ when it was first released because it offered several advantages over the previous FreeNAS Mini models. The space in the machine is better optimized, with almost all the available front panel space being utilized by five 3.5 hot swap bays and two 2.5 hot swap bays. Previous models required opening the case to access some of the 2.5 drives. This 5+2 layout, together with the upgraded CPU and RAM, is a nice compromise for someone who wants a more powerful machine than the previous E/E+ models, but not quite as large as the XL models. My X+ also came with dual onboard 10-gigabit ethernet, which is backward compatible with 1-gigabit switches. It also has a low-profile PCIe expansion slot, which I havent had the need to use yet. The really killer feature is the IPMI management port with HTML5 iKVM — I have never needed to attach a monitor and keyboard to the machine, because it is so much easier just to manage everything through my web browser. The TrueNAS Core web GUI is fantastic, and getting better with every release, but it does have a learning curve. Be aware that some technical understanding is needed to get the most out of the capabilities of your NAS. I think this is intrinsic to the technologies involved, rather than any design decisions by the iXsystems team. Other NAS manufacturers try to make their web GUIs look like computer desktops, with flashy apps and buzzwords, in an effort to make them seem user-friendly, while TrueNAS is no-nonsense, all the options that you need, no more and no less. For power users, you can do even more things with plugins and jails, and almost anything is possible for those who dig into the command line. The TrueNAS Mini line, unlike TrueNAS Enterprise machines, does not come with software support, but it does come with a limited hardware warranty (read the fine print). Nonetheless, when Ive needed support, Ive been very satisfied. There is a built-in tool in the TrueNAS Core GUI for filing bug reports, which I used once in the early days of TrueNAS 12. My bug got fixed in the very next release, after they kept me updated about the progress of the fix. There are tremendous benefits to the open source nature of TrueNAS, with very active community forums and a lot of online information. And whenever Ive had occasion to talk directly with the folks at iXsystems, theyve been a very friendly and helpful bunch, based in the USA. I would recommend the TrueNAS Mini line to anyone who wants the very best in storage technology on a small scale, and who is willing to make a minor intellectual investment in configuring it. The open-source TrueNAS Core can also be installed on your own homebuilt hardware, but in pricing out the parts I wanted, I found that it was not much more expensive to just buy the Mini X+, which provides not only a beautiful and compact enclosure, but also the peace of mind that it was designed by experts, and includes enterprise features like the IPMI and ECC RAM.

I have been using FreeBSD for my fileserver for 10 years as I never found FreeNAS (precursor of TrueNAS) to be polished enough, but last time I test-drove TrueNAS under a VMWare vm I was blown away. TrueNAS felt ready for prime time. After a month of usage it has not disappointed. I am fairly experienced with ZFS, yet I appreciate a slick GUI to satisfy 99.9% of my storage needs. I should note that I got the 64GB ECC RAM upgrade (installed prior to shipping the box) and I use it strictly as a NAS with a QNAP QSW-M408-4C 10GiE switch, no jails, no plugins etc. The Mini X+ box itself is very well built and whisper quiet. Definitely recommended.

In 2014 I set up a couple FreeNAS boxes that I made from scratch. These were in large CPU towers and running FreeNAS 9.1/9.2. They ran very well for me, but were challenging for me to set up (I am not an IT professional, but I am an engineer and generally OK with technical stuff). I have had to replace a power supply and some other small hardware items, but overall I was very happy once they were up and running. I had zvols set up and SCSI drives so Windows would see them. I set up a QNAP NAS a year or so ago to replace one of the FreeNAS boxes. This purchase replaces the other FreeNAS box. The first impression when unboxing is very good. The NAS is packaged very well. The packaging is made for the device. They dont just put the NAS in any old box that is laying around. The packaging is very thick and the NAS should arrive safe and sound even if your delivery person is not very careful. It certainly gives confidence that thigs will go well. I love the form factor. The QNAP and TrueNAS products are compact and take up a lot less room than my but full tower boxes. The install for me went very well, much better than the original setup in 2014. I purchased the diskless NAS and put in 5x 8TB hard drives in RAID-Z2. It was not clear to me if the TrueNAS software would already be installed if I purchased the diskless system and I was happy to see that software was installed. It is installed somewhere internally (no USB stick like my old setup). Mine came with the last version of FreeNAS (12.?). I updated to TrueNAS through the FreeNAS 12.? dashboard before adding any drives. No USB imaging or downloading files. Just select upgrade and 5 minutes later I was on TrueNAS. I imagine future boxes will ship with TrueNAS. The other concern I had was the network connections. It has dual 10 GbE network connections. My network is 1 GB ethernet. Would I need special adapters or cables? Nope, the ports look just like standard ethernet connectors. I am not using the 10 GB capabilities, but I had no problem connecting to my network. Transfering files from my old NAS to TrueNAS through my Windows 10 computer shows 30-50 MB/s in the copy progress window. In 2014 I installed the software on a USB device and booted from it. I had to hook up a monitor and keyboard so I could respond to the prompts to get the box up and running and could then manage it from a computer on my network. This Mini X+ came with the software which booted up without prompts so I could just connect in from a computer on the network and NOT have to hook up a keyboard and monitor. I just had to look at my modem to find what IP address it was running on. Maybe not a big deal, but it made things very easy. TrueNAS is so much easier to set up than FreeNAS 9.1 was. Everything is point and click, intuitive, lots of support documents on the TrueNAS site to get the basics set up. Managing permissions was easy. I selected to use ZFS Datasets instead of the zvol/SCSI set up. It was very easy to set it up to share and recognize the drives on multiple computers on my network. I am using Windows 10. I had been running a Plex server from my computer even though the media was on the old NAS. With my new setup I have Plex running on the TrueNAS box and it only took a few clicks to set it up. Several good YouTube videos to help set up the permission/user. Much easier than I expected. I find the QNAP and TrueNAS devices to be similar. I went with QNAP a year ago because I did not want to hassle with the setup process and wanted a small form factor. If I had known how nice the hardware is, and how easy the new releases of FreeNAS/TrueNAS are, then I probably would have gone with them instead. Both NASs are working well and are easy to manage, but I like the TrueNAS better at this point. The TrueNAS interface is easier for me to use. Just be aware that with TrueNAS, once you set up your RAID-Zx pool you cannot add to it. You can add another pool, but if you put in 4x 8TB drives in RAID-Z2 then you will have the storage space of two drives (16 TB nominal) and two parity drives. You cannot later add a 5th drive to the box and expand the pool so that you can have 24 TB of storage space. If you set up all 5 drives initially, then you can get the 24 TB of storage space and two parity drives. I believe that the QNAP system does allow their storage pools to be expanded by adding drives (I could be wrong, but that is what the documentation says). The point - buy all the drives that you are going to need when you set up the TrueNAS box.

As NAS appliances go, I’m sure you can find smaller units out there. However, this is a microserver with a NAS OS and I have never seen a microserver with a smaller footprint than this one. I found the aesthetics to be very pleasing too but this is entirely subjective. The front door is a bit flimsy for my taste. I have another NAS server that uses the Silverstone DS380 case and I was expecting that level of rigidity for some reason. The packaging is outstanding. I know it is weird being excited about a cardboard box but mine was delivered with a hole on it and nothing inside was affected. There is a thick foam molded around everything inside that is at least 2” thick. The foam has cutout pockets for each hard drive caddy and accessory box inside in addition to the server. Very organized and pleasant unboxing experience. About noise, it is not loud but is not silent either. To be fair i have it located less than 3ft from me at an ear level which is the worst place you can place anything that produces any kind of noise. I’m sure that it will not be noticeable once i relocate it to be below my desk but i figured i should mention this as acoustics was one of the main selling points for me. Airflow seems to be very good as the hard drives never reach temps above 34 degrees. This is impressive as air flow seems to be a challenging issue in smaller cases like this one. The OS came installed in a NVME solid state hard drive installed in an internal M.2 slot on the motherboard. This means that all external hard drive trays are available. Expansion is an issue as there is only 1 PCIe slot. In my case i wanted a SLOG device to increase my sync write speeds. The best way to do this is to install a fast solid state drive in the PCIe slot (in my case an optane memory in a PCIe to M.2 card). This works great but now i don’t have any more slots to install additional cards. This limitation may be important to people that needs a GPU for hardware transcoding in PLEX. Something that I found about this unit (that should be listed as a feature somewhere) is that this unit is fully compatible with shucked hard drives that suffers from the 3.3V disable pin (google it). This means that you can buy an external hard drive at a much lower price than a NAS drive, extract it from the enclosure and use it in this unit without having to modify anything. It will just work. All in all, great unit.

Mine arrived with TrueNAS 12 installed. If you are planning on upgrading to 13, its easier to do it before you configure your array. Ive had RAID arrays going back to 18GB SCSI drives, and this thing is a game changer for a performance home user or small office. Im using 5x 20TB drives, and I am limited by my 2.5gbps ethernet adapter for both read and write - so Im not sure what the maximum capabilities really are. But, thats at least 3x faster than my last raid5 NAS. I no longer feel like Im sacrificing anything by putting files on the NAS.

The TrueNAS Mini X+ is a thing of beauty. It works so much better than my home built TrueNAS did. I appreciate that iXsystems builds and tests the systems before shipping. While that meant I had to wait a little longer than I was hoping it was great to know it had been tested and was ready for me to put it to full use. Representatives from iXsystems kept me informed along the way, which was very nice as well. This is working great for a family Plex server and storage. I highly recommend this unit.

What iX Systems has done is to make a robust and convenient management user interface and documentation that permits a careful operator to use OpenZFS 2 file services in home and small office environments. The TrueNAS Mini products are designed specifically for this market. A home brew TrueNAS Core system has served as a Time Machine spool volume and home music server for 5 years. Originally, a single system with an extra internal disk for local backup, the plan was to add a second system at around the 5 year point to back up the original. The original home brew system has had its first disk failures, Ive replaced the drives, and re-established array integrity following the maintenance procedures in the TrueNAS Core Guide on-line at iX systems. As is common, the second drive failure happened while TrueNAS was resilvering the array following disk replacement. Resilvering is the process of reading all of the data still available to reconstruct the contents of the disk that was replaced. It is a fairly IO intensive process likely to hasten failure of a weak disk. It is for this reason that storage admins recommend using RAIDZ2 double redundancy over RAIDZ or mirroring. As planned, it was time to commission the second system. Most TrueNAS home users have 2, a primary system and a replication target that stores a backup of the primary. When a failure occurs, services can be shifted from the primary to the secondary while the primary is repaired. This arrangement gives a local working copy and a first on-site backup. I obtain a second on-site backup by replicating the backup pool on the secondary to an internal backup pool on a different volume also in the secondary. Replication is a network transfer permitting the secondary to be located at a friend, parent, or siblings home to provide an off-site backup in the area. Or a third machine could be added to the replication tree for this purpose. All of these are standard OpenZFS 2 capabilities. This backup arrangement may sound a bit sketch but it is acceptable because usage is light, primarily as a home MacOS Time Machine store and Roon Labs Roon music server. Roon runs nicely in a Linux virtual machine on the TrueNAS host. This arrangement ensures that the music files are available before Roon starts. There are no annoying races between Roon and Roons file server. I home brewed the first machine because I wanted enough spare CPU and memory to run Roon and had no idea how heavy a task that was. After some experience, it was obvious that Roon was not a significant burden and that I could use one of the TrueNAS Mini packaged systems. As with the first build, I tried to spec a system at PC Parts Picker. This time around with AMD RYZEN ZEN 3 parts. I ran into two issues. First, PC Parts Picker was gamer oriented. They were not careful about ECC memory needed by TrueNAS. If a part was ECC capable, that fact was often omitted from the database. Once I found a set of parts, the pandemic and the crypto-currency madness made it difficult to source the part or if found, its price was unreasonable. And I confirmed that iX Systems Mini prices were competitive. Over the years, I have learned to be careful sourcing disks. Online retailers often put some bubble wrap around OEM disks bought in volume and toss them into a too-big box for shipment. The more careful retailers provide retail packaged disks in ones and twos orders. How a disk is treated en route is a big factor in obtaining its design service life. To ensure proper treatment of disks, I ordered a bespoke system directly from iX Systems rather than ordering a diskless system from the iX Systems Amazon store front and adding my own disks. iX Systems put the ordered disks in their carriers and packed the carriers in foam flats that stacked with the system enclosure foam. Everything arrived in good order. All I had to do was insert the carriers and follow the Getting Started procedure in the TrueNAS Core User Guide. The second advantage of ordering iX Systems gear is that TrueNAS is iX Systems enclosure-aware. It knows which disk serial numbers are in which slots and shows you. To replace a disk, there is no need to take the machine apart and remove disks one at a time to find the failed drive identified by its serial number. Just look on the map shown in the figure accompanying this review. TrueNAS cant do this with third-party enclosures like that I used for the home-brew machine. You may not wish to avoid the fun of SATA cable connectors breaking, slipping off, or being missed during reassembly. Each of those dumb things happened during the repair of the incumbent system. A hot swap enclosures storage backplane spares you such indignities. Both machines continue in service. Data was migrated from the incumbent to the new-comer, Roon installed, and replication established. Everything is working correctly with a minimum of fuss.