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

Due to a slight customization I had to order this direct from iXsystems (I wanted mirrored internal boot devices, leaving all 7 storage bays available for storage drives). Well protected in shipment with lots of custom foam blocks in a large box (for such a compact machine). Very nice design, iX fits a TON into this tiny mini-ITX custom chassis! I like that they added an active cooling fan to the normally passively cooled Super Micro MoBo. Thankful that the 32GB RAM was 2 x 16GB so that upgrading to 64GB will be relatively inexpensive. With the 8C Intel CPU, 32GB ECC RAM, 2 x 10Gbe NICs + dedicated Gbe BMC/IPMI, 7 hotswap bays plus 4 internal SATA and 1 internal M.2 NVMe, it would be extremely difficult for me to build a mini-ITX server at this price. Would be nice if iX offered WD Red+ drives closer to Amazon pricing. I ended up ordering diskless and feel I got a nice value. Thank you guys at iX for all you do to provide and maintain TrueNAS for the community, it is the unequalled, unbeatable NAS OS!

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.

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.

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.

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.

I purchased the above system from XiSystems because Amazon didnt have the exact build I wanted at the time. I dealt with Brittany Bicomong and she made the entire experience fantastic. I love the FreeNAS Mini X+ that I purchased. I loaded my own hard drives into the unit and started it up and everything worked perfectly. I built my Dataset Pool and it is working perfectly. My only complaint was that it took a long time to receive my unit. I purchased on the November 30th and received it on December 21st. Other than that I can highly recommend a FreeNAS system to anyone.