I have recently learned that TrueNAS 25.10 (Goldeye) removed SMART Scheduling from the Web UI:
SMART Monitoring:
- 25.10 removes the built-in SMART test scheduling and monitoring interface to improve user flexibility for disk monitoring. The smartmontools binaries remain installed and continue to be used internally by TrueNAS, ensuring that existing third-party scripts and monitoring tools continue to work unchanged. Users seeking advanced SMART monitoring can install the “Scrutiny” app from the TrueNAS catalog, which offers superior disk health tracking with historical data storage, customizable alerts, and automatic drive detection. TrueNAS maintains monitoring of critical disk health indicators and automatically migrates existing scheduled SMART tests to cron tasks during upgrade. See Disk Management for more information on disk health monitoring in 25.10 and beyond.
This is a baffling change. TrueNAS is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) operating system. Data integrity is important for NAS users, it is important enough that TrueNAS has a “Data Protection” tab (which was where SMART tests used to be scheduled, before that section was removed in the 25.10 update).
SMART tests have their flaws, even so they can be very valuable and were used by many TrueNAS users, including me! One of the reasons I liked using TrueNAS was how easy it was to schedule SMART tests and ZFS scrub tasks.
What Are SMART Tests?
SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is the drive’s built-in health reporting. It exposes attributes (error counters, temps, reallocated/pending sectors, etc.) and can run self-tests on demand.
The two tests most people schedule are:
- Short test: quick sanity check.
- Long/extended test: full surface scan that can take hours (and may impact performance while running).
SMART tests don’t replace ZFS scrubs (scrubs verify data end-to-end), but they’re still useful as an early warning system for drives that are slowly going bad.
What Exactly Did TrueNAS Remove?
Technically, iXsystems did not remove any SMART functionality from the system, only a UI section. SMART tests can still be scheduled using cron, though it is more cumbersome. For such a critical task, I appreciate having a UI that explains when tests are scheduled and makes it easy to schedule them at different times.
Indeed, the SMART UI in TrueNAS was never great. For as much as I avoid using TrueNAS apps (for reasons such as TrueNAS having broken every single app in the past when they moved from Kubernetes to Docker), the one app I always install is Scrutiny. It explains the SMART results better than any other app that I have found. Nevertheless, I take issue with the recommendation to use it as if it’s an alternative (“Users seeking advanced SMART monitoring can install the “Scrutiny” app from the TrueNAS catalog, which offers superior disk health tracking with historical data storage, customizable alerts, and automatic drive detection”). Scrutiny is great at displaying SMART results, however it does not schedule the tests itself. Scrutiny is also seeking new maintainers. What would’ve been nice was if instead of just pointing users to a third-party app, iXsystems would have stepped up and contributed to Scrutiny, acknowledging the things it does better than TrueNAS itself while also working to bring a better SMART UI to TrueNAS. Notably, iXsystems have contributed back to OpenZFS.
How Did the TrueNAS Community Respond?
What was perhaps more infuriating than the decision itself was the stubbornness in ignoring the community feedback that followed. A feature request to Bring back SMART scheduling to UI was opened on the Feature Requests section on the TrueNAS forums, stating “Literally no one approves this change. Bring it back.”. The feature request gained significant traction: it received 121 votes and 110 responses. In the end, after internal discussion, the feature was denied (with explanations that many users didn’t find convincing).
If this doesn’t prove that iXsystems doesn’t care about community feedback, I don’t know what does. So much for TrueNAS “Community Edition”.
Will I Keep Using TrueNAS?
I have been using TrueNAS for several years, since the release of TrueNAS SCALE in 2022 (which has since been renamed to TrueNAS Community Edition). I have maintained scripts that help install TrueNAS on Proxmox VE. To this day, TrueNAS remains a critical part of my homelab.
Of course there are alternatives. Before I moved to TrueNAS, I was using OpenMediaVault (OMV). I have high praise for that project, and unlike TrueNAS and Unraid, OMV is community-driven with no profit motives (donations are accepted). The main reason I moved to TrueNAS at the time was the native ZFS integration. OMV relies on a plugin to enable ZFS. It works, but I preferred a system that’s designed to work with ZFS from the get-go (I was able to export my ZFS pool from OMV and import it into TrueNAS with no data loss).
These days, if I were to move away from TrueNAS, I will likely go the DIY route instead. When I think of what I use TrueNAS for, all I really need is a system that supports ZFS, NFS/SMB data shares, SMART tests and Scrutiny. I am currently experimenting with a NixOS installation that does all of that in one declarative configuration.
Nevertheless, for now I plan to stay with TrueNAS (at least until I finish examining NixOS for this purpose). I will continue using TrueNAS for the time being, ensure SMART tests are still scheduled in cron, as well as continue using Scrutiny.
There is value in having a curated and tested NAS distribution, even if I don’t agree with all of their decisions. I am reminded of the time that Linus Sebastian lost a petabyte of data, due to having manually configured ZFS on CentOS without data scrubbing. In TrueNAS, data scrubbing is configured by default to run automatically, and at least the scheduling UI for that has not been removed.
