TL;DL - Faster, and 35% lower power consumption!!!
I recently bit the bullet and installed TrueNAS Scale on my TS-870 Pro (with RAM and CPU upgrades). The pros are amazing, the cons are minor annoyances and are something I can deal with. A fresh backup up 22GB of data took days! (EDIT: 22TB! Well spotted @dolbyman!)
But look at this power consumption! I didn’t screenshot usage pre-August 2025, but:
| OS | Power Consumption |
|---|---|
| QTS | ~3.7 kWh/day |
| TrueNAS | ~2.4 kWh/day |
That’s a 35% Power saving on Daily use with the same workload of containers running.
(If imgur works, these are screenshots from a TAPO energy monitor for TS-870 Pro)
August 2025 Power Consumption:
September 2025 Power Consumption:
Pros of TrueNAS:
- FAST to reboot. Reboot in little over a minute.
- More up-to-date docker support since V24.04 (with caveats)
- Snappier performance for containers
- Containers immensely more stable. Up for months, not days.
- 35% less Power consumption! (can’t repeat this enough!)
Cons:
- Need to backup and delete the entire QNAP Raid Array, then rebuild in TrueNAS and restore backup.
- Need to enable developer mode for apt-get to work
- System changes overwritten with firmware update.Workaround for me is to script what I need installed and use brew which survives updates
- Cannot boot from NVME drive mounted on QM2-2P10G1T card. Workaround using CLOVER on USB Thumbdrive. Looking into installing to QNAP DOM
- QM2-2P10G1T’s 10GbE port not recognised due to lack of driver. Not an issue at the moment because my only other machine that supports 10GbE is out of commission at the moment.
