News

What is new in the project. Newest first.

17 September 2026 — the system lives on your data disks, no USB stick needed

TrueNAS requires a dedicated boot device and forbids putting pools on it. In practice that device ends up being a USB stick, and USB sticks die — a complaint familiar to almost every home NAS owner.

BSDnas drops the requirement. The installer takes a slice of a given size on each disk for the system and leaves the rest for data. The system lives on a mirror of those slices; data lives in an ordinary pool on what remains of the same disks.

Verified on real hardware: six 1 TB disks, 16 GB per disk for the system, boot-pool mirrored across all six, the data pool a raidz2 built from the remainder. One mirror member is a disk with 432 unreadable sectors, kept in on purpose — the install went through, the pool came up, no errors. A six-way mirror survives losing five disks, which leaves the system better protected than it ever was on a single stick.

Details on the Installation page.

19 August 2026 — updates run on their own train

The project no longer depends on the iXsystems update servers. BSDnas has its own mechanism: a new boot environment is created as a clone, the update is installed into it, and the previous one stays untouched — if something goes wrong, you go back by switching environments, not by restoring from a backup.

Details in Project status and Upgrading.