How to Set Up TrueNAS SCALE: From Bare Metal to First Share

TrueNAS SCALE, renamed TrueNAS Community Edition in 25.04, is iXsystems’ free Debian Linux NAS operating system built on OpenZFS. To set it up: install it on a dedicated 20 GB boot SSD, give it a static IP, create a ZFS pool (a mirror for two disks, RAIDZ2 for four or more), add datasets, then share them over SMB or NFS.

SCALE also serves iSCSI and runs Docker-compatible apps and optional virtual machines on top of the ZFS storage engine. Community Edition is the same software under a single name, so SCALE tutorials and menu paths still apply.

As of October 2026, the official TrueNAS software status page recommends TrueNAS 25.10.7 “Goldeye” (released 2 September 2026) for general users. 25.04 “Fangtooth” is in maintenance and no longer recommended for any user type. For a new build, start with Goldeye.

Hardware: What You Actually Need

TrueNAS SCALE’s published minimums are conservative for home use. If the download page’s Community Edition branding is what brought you here, TrueNAS Community Edition vs SCALE explains that it is the same product. The real floor:

• CPU: Any x86_64 processor from the last decade. An N100 mini-PC works for a single-user media NAS; a Xeon E or Ryzen builds headroom for VMs and apps.
• RAM: 8 GB is the absolute minimum; 16 GB is a comfortable start. ZFS uses RAM for its ARC cache — more RAM means better read performance. If you plan to run apps or VMs alongside storage, budget 32 GB. ECC RAM is recommended: ZFS checksums data on disk, but a RAM bit-flip before the checksum is computed corrupts data silently. ECC catches that class of error. The TrueNAS hardware guide goes deeper on RAM sizing, HBAs, and drive selection, and the best budget NAS build for home lays out a concrete sub-$600 parts list if you are starting from nothing.
• Boot drive: 20 GB minimum, on a dedicated device: a small SATA or NVMe SSD you are not using for data (TrueNAS discourages USB sticks and spinning disks for boot). Keep this separate from your storage pool.
• Data drives: At minimum two drives of identical size to create a mirrored pool. Four drives gets you RAIDZ2. Used enterprise SATA or SAS drives (Seagate Exos, WD Ultrastar) are the homelab-standard choice.

If an LSI HBA shipped with IR (RAID) firmware, reflash it to IT mode so ZFS sees the disks directly. The Broadcom 9300-8i (flashed to IT mode) is the community standard.

Installing TrueNAS SCALE

Download and write boot media. Grab the installer ISO from the official TrueNAS downloads page. On Linux, write it to USB with dd status=progress if=TrueNAS-SCALE.iso of=/dev/sdX. On Windows, Rufus works cleanly. Ventoy is useful if you manage multiple ISOs on one drive.

Boot the installer. Insert the USB, access your UEFI/BIOS (the hotkey varies by motherboard — common ones are Delete, F2, or F11), and select the USB as the boot device. The 25.10 install guide says to disable Secure Boot, or set it to Other OS, so the media can boot. Choose UEFI boot mode where your hardware supports it; legacy BIOS mode still works but is the older path.

Work through the installer.

1. Choose Install/Upgrade on the console setup menu.
2. Select the destination disk for TrueNAS and confirm with Yes. This erases everything on that drive.
3. Choose 1 Administrative user (truenas_admin) and set a strong password. This is the account you will use to access the web UI.
4. At the Legacy Boot prompt, select Yes to let the system boot via UEFI, or No only if your hardware requires legacy BIOS boot.
5. When Installation Succeeded appears, select OK, reboot, and remove the USB.

There is no swap question any more. The system boots to a text console and displays its IP address, assigned via DHCP by default. That address is your entry point to the web UI.

Does TrueNAS SCALE use a swap partition?

No. TrueNAS 24.10 “Electric Eel” removed swap creation, reporting and management from TrueNAS, and the 25.10 installer asks no swap question. Swap had already been disabled by default in 24.04.1 (28 May 2024), after a ZFS ARC memory issue caused excessive swap use that slowed systems down.

Per the 24.04 version notes, 24.04.1 also set vm.swappiness to 1; on 24.04.0 the documented stopgap was running swapoff -a as root. The 24.10 notes then list “Remove creation/reporting/management of swap on TrueNAS.”

Older pools can still carry swap partitions. In 23.10 the Swap Size setting (in GiB) added a swap partition to every data disk, and the 23.10 installer offered an optional Create Swap step on the boot device. If you went looking for swap because the box runs short of memory, add RAM instead: TrueNAS RAM requirements by workload sizes it for storage, apps and VMs.

Initial Web UI Configuration

Open a browser on any machine on the same network and navigate to the IP shown on the console. Log in with truenas_admin and the password you set.

There is no first-login setup wizard. After first login, set the basics from the menus:

• Hostname and DNS: Under Network > Global Configuration, set a meaningful hostname (e.g., nas01) and point DNS at your router or a local resolver.
• Time zone: Under System > General Settings > Localization, set it correctly. ZFS scrub schedules, snapshot schedules, and logs all depend on this.
• Network interface: If you want a static IP (recommended for a NAS), configure it under Network > Interfaces before your DHCP lease can move on you.

TrueNAS SCALE RAID Options

TrueNAS SCALE does RAID in software through ZFS, so there is no RAID controller array to build. The pool wizard offers four layout types: Stripe, Mirror, RAIDZ (1, 2 or 3 parity disks) and dRAID (1, 2 or 3). For a home NAS, use a Mirror for two disks and RAIDZ2 for four or more.

Usable space follows the OpenZFS approximation of (disks − parity) × disk size, before metadata and padding. Minimums come from TrueNAS’s pool documentation and the 25.10 pool wizard guide.

• TrueNAS RAID 1 is the Mirror layout. A mirror of N disks survives N − 1 failures and stores one disk’s worth. Adding more two-disk mirrors later, as vdevs of the same type, builds RAID 10 (25.10 pool management guide).
• RAIDZ1 and large drives. The TrueNAS ZFS primer does not recommend RAIDZ1 for drives over 1 TiB, and suggests 3 to 9 disks per vdev, never more than 12. RAIDZ1 vs RAIDZ2 covers the resilver risk.
• dRAID is for big arrays. TrueNAS strongly recommends RAIDZ below 10 disks.
• Skip hardware RAID. The ZFS primer says ZFS “does not need a RAID controller”; put any controller in JBOD mode.
• Parity is permanent. The 25.10 Extend button widens a RAIDZ vdev one disk at a time, but RAIDZ1 stays RAIDZ1. Other growth routes are in expanding a TrueNAS pool.

The choice between these layouts is the one pool decision you cannot easily reverse later — RAIDZ vs mirrors: ZFS pool design breaks down usable capacity, rebuild risk, and IOPS so you pick the right topology the first time.

Setting Up Storage: Pools and Datasets

This is where ZFS-specific decisions matter. Create your first pool in the Pool Creation Wizard:

1. Go to Storage and click Create Pool.
2. Name the pool with up to 50 lowercase letters and numbers (hyphens and underscores are fine; no uppercase, no spaces). You cannot rename a pool after creation, so pick something you can live with (tank, pool0, or the hostname-prefixed nas01-data are all fine).
3. Leave pool-level encryption off; the wizard guide recommends encrypting individual datasets or zvols instead.
4. On the Data screen, pick the Layout, then set Disk Size, Width (disks per vdev) and Number of VDEVs. Tick Treat Disk Size as Minimum to let larger disks qualify, or use Manual Disk Selection under Advanced Options.
5. Click Save And Go To Review to skip the optional vdev types, then Create Pool.

For RAID 10 on four disks, that is Mirror, Width 2, two VDEVs; for six-disk RAIDZ2, it is RAIDZ2, Width 6, one VDEV.

After the pool is created, build your dataset tree before you create any shares. A dataset is a ZFS filesystem with its own permissions, quota, and compression settings. A flat pool with all data thrown into the root dataset is the mistake that makes reorganization painful later. (If you are unsure when to create a dataset versus a raw block device, datasets vs zvols draws the line.)

A minimal structure for a home NAS:

tank/
  media/         # Plex/Jellyfin, no compression needed for already-compressed video
  documents/     # Enable LZ4 compression; meaningful savings on office files
  backups/       # Incremental backup target
  apps/          # TrueNAS app data; separate dataset so snapshots are independent

When creating each dataset, use the SMB preset if the share will serve Windows clients, or Generic for NFS-primary datasets. The preset configures ACL type and share-protocol-appropriate defaults.

Creating Your First SMB Share

SMB (Server Message Block) is the Windows-native file-sharing protocol — the right choice for most home networks with a mix of Windows, macOS, and Linux clients.

1. Go to System Settings > Services and enable the SMB service. Toggle on Start Automatically so it survives reboots.
2. Navigate to Shares > Windows Shares (SMB) and click Add.
3. Set the Path to the dataset you created (e.g., /mnt/tank/documents).
4. Give the share a name — this is what clients see when they browse the network.
5. Save and apply.

On Windows, open File Explorer and type \\<your-NAS-IP> in the address bar. The share appears immediately. For Linux clients, mount with mount -t cifs //nas-ip/documents /mnt/nas -o username=truenas_admin. The full walkthrough — ACLs, user/group setup, and the permission gotchas that make SMB look broken — is in setting up SMB shares on TrueNAS SCALE.

For NFS shares (better for Linux VMs and Proxmox storage), the process is similar under Shares > Unix Shares (NFS). If you are weighing which protocol to use for which client, TrueNAS share-type choices maps each one to its job.

Can TrueNAS SCALE mount an NTFS drive?

Not from the web UI. SCALE 23.10 removed the old Import Disk feature, which copied an NTFS, FAT, UFS or ext2 disk into a dataset, because it did not reliably preserve file attributes and permissions. The supported method is to attach the NTFS drive to a PC and copy its files to a TrueNAS share over the network.

An iXsystems moderator confirmed on the forums that “direct USB import” went away in 23.10 and that copying over SMB or NFS “has proven to be more reliable.” To move an NTFS drive’s contents today:

1. Create a dataset with the SMB preset and share it, as above.
2. Plug the NTFS drive into a Windows PC, which reads NTFS natively.
3. Open the share at \\<your-NAS-IP> in File Explorer and copy the folders across. From Linux, rsync to the mounted share does the same job.
4. Spot-check file counts and permissions on the NAS before you wipe the drive.

Mounting the disk from the TrueNAS shell and copying locally is unsupported, and a community thread on that workaround warns it can leave ACLs and permissions wrong on the destination dataset. If the disk holds a ZFS pool from another TrueNAS system, use Import Pool on the Storage screen instead.

Backups: The Part You Will Skip (Don’t)

ZFS RAID is not a backup — it protects against drive failure, not against accidental deletion, ransomware, or misconfiguration. Set up two things before you put data on your NAS:

Periodic snapshots. Under Data Protection > Periodic Snapshot Tasks, create a task for each dataset with daily snapshots retained for 30 days, and weekly snapshots retained for 12 weeks. Snapshots are space-efficient (only changed blocks cost space) and let you roll back individual files without a full restore.

Replication. Replicate snapshots to a second location: a second pool on the same machine at minimum, or a remote TrueNAS system for real off-site protection. The replication task wizard in Data Protection > Replication Tasks handles ZFS send/receive automatically, which needs a ZFS system on the receiving end. For Backblaze B2 or S3 object storage, use a Cloud Sync task instead. The full schedule, retention math, and off-site target options live in the snapshot and replication strategy guide.

Scrub schedule. Under Data Protection > Scrub Tasks, verify a monthly scrub is configured on each pool. A scrub reads every block and validates checksums — it catches silent corruption before it spreads. Pair it with SMART self-tests as described in the scrub and SMART disk-health routine.

When you are exposing shares or the web UI to anything outside your LAN, review the security posture. For network hardening context, TechSentinel covers emerging NAS-targeted threats and relevant CVEs.

Related across the network

• OpenMediaVault Hardware Requirements and Build Guide — openmediavaultlab.com
• OpenMediaVault vs TrueNAS vs Synology: Which NAS? — openmediavaultlab.com

Related on this site

• TrueNAS SCALE vs Unraid vs OMV, including home media

FAQ

is truenas scale free

Yes. TrueNAS SCALE, now called TrueNAS Community Edition, is iXsystems’ free, open-source platform for non-enterprise users, and you install it on your own hardware at no cost. TrueNAS Enterprise runs the same codebase with added features and paid professional support, which a home or homelab build does not need.

is freenas scale the same as truenas scale

There is no FreeNAS SCALE. FreeNAS was the free FreeBSD-based edition that iXsystems renamed TrueNAS CORE, while SCALE is the separate Debian Linux release first shipped in February 2022. SCALE was renamed TrueNAS Community Edition with 25.04, and CORE is now in maintenance, so new installs should use the Linux line.

how do i set up raid 1 in truenas scale

Create a pool with the Mirror layout. In Storage, click Create Pool, name it, choose Mirror on the Data screen, set Width to 2 and Number of VDEVs to 1, then review and create. Two disks of equal size give one disk of usable space and survive one drive failure.

which raid should i use for 4 drives in truenas

Use RAIDZ2 or two mirror vdevs. Both leave two disks of usable space from four. RAIDZ2 survives any two failures; striped mirrors survive two only if they hit different pairs, but handle small random reads better for VMs. RAIDZ1 gives three disks of space, but TrueNAS does not recommend it for drives over 1 TiB.