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

Fantastic - zero complaints.

This is a really nice product! Not only is it pretty fast, it’s packed with built in functionality, and extensible through plugins to be a generally useful addition to the home lab or small office. That said. The 2.5” drive bays were not plugged in when I got the unit. I had to take the sides off, clip the wire ties, and connect the power supply to the board. It’s not like it fell off during shipping, it was tied in a way that it could never have been plugged in to begin with. This might lead you to think that the SSD drive bays don’t work. They do, but you have to plug them in first inside the case. I found this out from someone else online posting about it, so it’s obviously something that happens often enough. I also found that the 10gb Ethernet ports don’t work with my 2.5 gigabit unmanaged switch. I had to plug it into my 1 gigabit switch, or it wouldn’t get an IP. Kinda strange and annoying. Overall, I really like it. The switch thing is weird, but I’m mostly docking it a star because I don’t generally expect to have to do that kind of surgery on a brand new and fairly expensive product I just bought.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Everything was easy to set up with the provided manual and the server came with all the necessary parts, including two Ethernet cables and all the screws necessary for the full set of drives (plus spares and extras), even though the drives themselves were purchased separately in my case. The front door is a bit thinner than I expected, but otherwise the build is sturdy and the case easily opened up for upgrades in the future. Noise-wise, it is noticeable in a quiet room but not distracting unless you turn the fans up using IPMI (might be necessary if you prefer to keep your drives cooler than 45C when active). While the price seems to be inflated compared to what it used to be, I looked up the cost of building a similar product from individual components and it was not much cheaper. Youll probably get a better deal if you go for used server parts, but you wont necessarily get good power efficiency that way and it might be overkill for small-scale/home use. On the software side, community support is widely available on the TrueNAS forums and the like, and I had no issue finding answers to most of the questions I had starting off. I havent put much work into setting up jails/non-storage applications yet, but the configuration I have should have plenty of capability for those, though it wont be doing much high-performance computing work.

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.