Unraid vs TrueNAS Scale: Which NAS OS is the best? (2024)

Proprietary operating systems on pre-built NAS devices work well for the most part. However, third-party OS are better when it comes to customizability. If you’ve ever tried building your own NAS, you may have come across the community-favorite TrueNAS lineup. But besides TrueNAS Core and Scale, Unraid is another OS that’s preferred by many NAS builders.

With updates on Core slowing down, Unraid is more-or-less TrueNAS Scale’s only rival. But as you’ll see in this comparison, the premium OS holds its ground against TrueNAS Scale.

Pricing

Winner: TrueNAS Scale, by a longshot!

Since Unraid is a premium OS, you’ll need to purchase a license and activate it to use the operating system after the initial 30-day trial period. If you've installed the trial version of Unraid, you'll have to register on the company's website the first time you boot into the OS. Depending on the features, you might need to pay between $49 to $249, with the latter being the tier for the lifetime license.

Moreover, the Unraid license is tied to your USB drive’s GUID, meaning you’ll need to request Unraid to migrate your license to a newer drive in case the previous one fails. As such, if you’re someone who frequently uses the same USB drive for all your OS installation needs, you'll have to get another one that you can dedicate to Unraid.

Meanwhile, TrueNAS Scale is an open-source operating system. As such, all its features are unlocked by default. Sure, iXsystems maintains a premium version of TrueNAS called Enterprise, but it’s vastly different from Scale, and is geared towards firms rather than enthusiast NAS owners. For the average (or even power) user, TrueNAS Scale is a complete experience that doesn't require you to pay extra money to access premium facilities.

Ease of installation

Winner: Unraid, though you'll need to dedicate a USB drive to it

You may have guessed by now that you’re supposed to install Unraid on the USB drive itself, instead of flashing some ISO file and using it to set up the OS on top of an HDD/SSD. Unraid provides a convenient USB Creator tool to help you accomplish this. Once you’re done, all you have to do is plug your USB drive into the NAS and voilà. Within minutes, your Unraid-powered NAS will be ready for use.

TrueNAS Scale, however, has the same installation procedure as any other desktop OS: write the ISO files to a USB drive using a flashing tool, use it to boot into Scale’s Installation Wizard, and select a few options to make the web UI accessible on other systems. While it doesn't take as long as your standard Windows or even GUI-based Linux distros, a fresh installation of TrueNAS Scale can take a little longer than Unraid's simple setup process.

It’s also worth noting that although you can technically install TrueNAS Scale on a USB drive, it’s really not recommended to do so, because the constant reads and writes will degrade the USB drive’s lifespan rather quickly. So, you’ll need to allocate at least one drive (preferably an SSD) for TrueNAS Scale’s installation.

Learning curve

Winner: Unraid and its simple UI

If you’re an absolute beginner to non-first-party NAS operating systems, Unraid provides a simpler user interface that’s fairly easy to get into. Setting up an array doesn’t require going through multiple menus, and you don’t have to pick an army of options to get your network shares or storage pools ready.

I’ll admit, iXsystems has made TrueNAS Scale’s web UI a lot simpler and uncluttered than its predecessor. You no longer need to traverse through a maze of options located in sub-menus inside other menus. However, there’s no denying that getting a pool up and ready still involves more effort than Unraid, and the same holds true for sharing the contents of your drives using network protocols.

Network sharing

Winner: TrueNAS Scale (and believe it or not, Core has even more options)

When it comes to the sheer number of file-sharing protocols, TrueNAS Scale easily beats Unraid. The Shares tab in TrueNAS Scale’s UI lets you configure SMB, iSCSI, and NFS shares. Once you head to the Services submenu in the System tab, you can even configure FTP to work with TrueNAS Scale. Heck, if you’re migrating from TrueNAS Core, you’ll even be able to use your existing Apple Shares via SMB.

Unraid, on the other hand, has a relatively smaller suite of network protocols. Inside the Network Services, you’ll find the options to enable FTP, SMB, and FTP Server, though you’ll need to access the SMB setups from the Shares option. Technically, you can configure iSCSI on Unraid, but you’ll need a third-party plugin to do so.

User groups

Winner: TrueNAS Scale, easy

If you’re used to the conventional permissions in Linux, you’ll feel right at home with TrueNAS Scale. Besides providing the option to create multiple users, Scale lets you set up different groups where you can grant the same privileges to multiple users.

Unfortunately, Unraid does away with the group-based system of TrueNAS. Sure, you get the option to create multiple users, but you can’t create user groups and assign permissions at once if you’re on Unraid.

File system and drive requirements

Winner: Unraid with its plethora of options

For years, iXsystems’ TrueNAS lineup has been popular among users thanks to its support for the feature-laden ZFS pools. However, Unraid added ZFS to its repertoire of file systems, removing the edge TrueNAS Scale had over the premium OS.

Apart from ZFS, Scale supports a bunch of other file systems, including Btrfs, XFS, and ReiserFS, alongside their encrypted versions. This allows you to use drives of different storage capacities in Unraid. Moreover, Unraid arrays store files on select drives instead of spreading them across all HDDs/SSDs on your NAS.

Meanwhile, TrueNAS is only compatible with ZFS, meaning you’ll need to have all drives of the same capacity if you want to utilize the RAID pools in the OS. While we’re on the subject of RAID…

RAID support

Winner: TrueNAS Scale (it's called Unraid, after all)

If the name wasn’t a dead giveaway, Unraid uses a different way to provide data redundancy than conventional RAID. Arrays in Unraid support the parity feature, which lets you rebuild the data from the same number of failed drives as your parity drives. However, Unraid doesn’t support striping, so it’s more akin to RAID 4 without the striping facility.

For the RAID aficionados, TrueNAS Scale is easily the better option, as it supports Striping and Mirroring, in addition to RAIDZ and dRAID configurations. This lets the high-end RAID setups featuring multiple HDDs provide much higher performance and better redundancy than their Unraid counterparts.

App support

Winner: Unraid's humongous library of applications

There’s no doubt that iXsystems upped the ante by adding Docker and Kubernetes containers and KVM virtualization features to TrueNAS Scale, especially to TrueNAS Core’s rudimentary jails. That said, the default app catalog is rather lacking on TrueNAS Scale.

A few months ago, the number of applications available on Scale was on par with Unraid due to the Truecharts repository. But following some strife between iXsystems and Truecharts developers, the latter deleted all their apps from the repo, and there won’t be any support for Truecharts apps going forward, leaving self-deployed Docker containers the only means to install more applications on TrueNAS.

In comparison, Unraid has a staggering number of apps spanning a huge collection of categories, including game servers, network security tools, and even AI LLMs and image generators.

Performance

Winner: TrueNAS Scale in both VM performance and (most) read/write tests

Before we get to the CrystalDiskInfo benchmarks, I wanted to compare the performance when running a virtual machine in TrueNAS Scale vs Unraid. To level the playing field, I used the same PC armed with an old Ryzen 5 1600 CPU and 16GB DDR4 for both Unraid and TrueNAS Scale. Resource-wise, I granted 8GB of RAM to the VM and allocated 4 CPU cores in both cases. Since I’m a fan of NixOS, that’s the first operating system I used.

TrueNAS Scale produced great results and while there were occasional slowdowns, the experience was pretty decent. However, Unraid had some performance issues, and I felt the experience to be rather sluggish when compared to Scale. I repeated this with Fedora, Pop_OS!, Q4OS, and Lubuntu. All operating systems (besides the highly optimized Q4OS) produced similar results to NixOS, making TrueNAS Scale the winner in VM-related tasks.

For the storage tests, I used the same 500GB WD hard drive on both OS in SMB configuration. Here’s the final benchmark when running the standard tests via CrystalDiskInfo:

Clearly, Unraid lacked quite a bit at random read speeds, while the other numbers were either comparable with TrueNAS Scale or quite a bit lower than the latter's score. I expect this disparity to go up when adding more disks in high-end RAIDZ setups on Scale.

Unraid vs TrueNAS Scale: Which one’s better for NAS users?

Unraid for beginners; TrueNAS Scale for experienced veterans

As much as I love iXsystem’s TrueNAS lineup, Unraid is better for non-performance-intensive workloads. Besides its lower hardware requirements, Unraid is more accessible to beginners, supports decent redundancy options, and lets you mix and match drives of different capacities in your arrays. On top of that, it has a wider range of apps available by default and you don’t have to allocate an entire drive to install the OS.

All that said, Unraid’s steep pricing model is its Achilles Heel, as the amount of money charged for the license can net you better hardware. For those who’re unwilling to spend more money on an OS, you won’t be disappointed with TrueNAS Scale. It’s not very intuitive and has a steeper learning curve. However, it provides better performance than its rival in addition to offering superior RAID support and more network share protocols.