After a tremendously successful and widely deployed BETA and RC, we’re pleased to announce that TrueNAS 24.10 “Electric Eel” has reached its official RELEASE version today, and is downloadable now from truenas.com/download-truenas-scale/ or by selecting to upgrade from within your existing SCALE installation.

Electric Eel succeeds Dragonfish (24.04.2.3), which is widely adopted in both Community and Enterprise installations. Dragonfish has become the most deployed version of TrueNAS, surpassing 13.0. TrueNAS 24.04 is also recommended for Mission-Critical deployments with significantly improved security and faster failover capabilities.

With over 9000 testers in our pre-release period, it’s no secret that Electric Eel is our most-anticipated release yet, and with good reason – it’s packed with several long-anticipated features like Docker Compose, both on the surface and under the hood, so let’s dig right in.

RAIDZ Expansion Is Here

One of the sticking points that we’ve heard from our community for years was the limitation that OpenZFS wasn’t able to expand its parity-based RAIDZ layouts by a single drive at a time.

After several years of intense development, testing, and debugging, we’re proud to announce that you can now pair the legendary resilience of OpenZFS with the easy expansion of conventional RAID solutions – drive-at-a-time expand is here.

Systems can be expanded online, one drive at a time, with no interruption in service – regardless of whether you’re using single, double, or triple-parity protection.

Traditional expansion using full vdevs is still available as before, and is the preferred method, but the new single-drive expansion offers new flexibility for smaller systems that may not have as many available drive bays.

Docker Touches Down with Improved Apps Handling

Since the initial launch of TrueNAS SCALE, Apps have played a major role in its adoption and flexibility.

Being able to run applications directly on the same system as their storage allows for both small “micro-service” style apps to leverage available power on a server, and for I/O-intensive applications to cut out network latency entirely from their workflow.

TrueNAS 24.10 migrates the previous Kubernetes-based Application back-end to the simpler Docker Compose solution, while seamlessly migrating and preserving the data of existing App installations.

If we haven’t built your preferred application out in our easy-to-install App catalog yet, or you’d like to customize it for your own specific needs, TrueNAS 24.10 also has full support for custom YAML config files (with the exception of individual IP addresses per application – coming in a post-release update) allowing you to import any of the hundreds of thousands of public Docker applications.

Want still more customization? Install the Dockge or Portainer runtimes on top of TrueNAS, directly from our App catalog – and tweak to your heart’s content.

For those who still want to leverage Kubernetes applications, a Kubernetes runtime can still be installed into a containerized or virtualized solution directly on TrueNAS; however, the primary method of App development and delivery will be through Docker and Docker Compose.

Fast Dedup Breaks Cover

Over a year ago, the TrueNAS development team and Klara Systems, along with members of the OpenZFS community, embarked on a journey to improve the data-reduction capabilities of OpenZFS through the Fast Deduplication project.

Several use cases can benefit from deduplication, including virtualization and office file storage where files may be copied to multiple locations by end-users; however, with the legacy OpenZFS deduplication algorithms, the overhead of maintaining the deduplication metadata tables in-memory at all times led to performance challenges and usability issues at scale.

Fast Dedup addresses these issues with multiple adjustments, including a more efficient metadata structure, a log-based write queue, and pruning of non-duplicate entries – all of which combine to shrink the memory footprint of deduplication by up to 90% in many scenarios.

The Fast Dedup feature is now ready for testing in TrueNAS 24.10, but is not recommended for serious production use at this time. We expect to provide testing results and any necessary code improvements in early 2025.

Global Search and Customizable Dashboard Widgets

Our new global UI search option helps you get to the settings you want faster than ever before. With just a few keystrokes, find the page you want, go there with a single click, and helpful highlights will appear to guide your eyes to the correct form, button, or area to explore next.

Can’t find what you want or need to dig deeper? Use the same menu to search the TrueNAS Docs site for more information. You can also use the new TrueNAS AI Search tool to ask more conversational questions and generate solutions to specific TrueNAS problems.

Usability and customization go hand-in-hand. While the TrueNAS team has designed a default dashboard with essential information, we know users have unique needs.

With our new customizable dashboard, you can place your most crucial information front and center, ready the moment you log in.

TrueNAS H-Series Gains NVMe Support

This spring, we launched the newest member of our TrueNAS Enterprise hardware family, the versatile TrueNAS H-Series, the perfect vehicle for delivering the power of TrueNAS in a compact, power-efficient package.

Now, the H-Series gets a jolt of extra horsepower from the release of TrueNAS 24.10 with the enabling of NVMe storage options on all twelve bays, bringing the maximum capacity of the H-Series to 360 TB using twelve 30 TB NVMe drives.

This new functionality is ready to be enabled in the field with an upgrade to Electric Eel; no controller replacement or component swaps needed. This tri-mode (SAS & NVMe) capability with High Availability is relatively unique in a 2U cost-effective platform.

New TrueNAS H-Series units configured with NVMe drives will ship with TrueNAS 24.10 already installed; existing TrueNAS Enterprise customers looking to take advantage of NVMe on H-Series platforms should reach out to our Support team to discuss an upgrade path that fits their needs.

Ready When You Are

The initial version, TrueNAS 24.10.0, is released and ready to download immediately.

Keep an eye on the Software Status page to see when your use case aligns with the new version, and when you’re ready, join the thousands of users already powering up with Electric Eel by downloading the installer or upgrading from within the TrueNAS UI; and don’t forget to stop by the TrueNAS Forums to share your knowledge and experience.

Join today and help others unlock the power of True Data Freedom with TrueNAS.