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Dell PowerStore vs FreeNAS comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 7, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerStore
Ranking in NAS
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
249
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (7th), Enterprise SAN (1st), All-Flash Storage (1st), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (1st)
FreeNAS
Ranking in NAS
15th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the NAS category, the mindshare of Dell PowerStore is 8.1%, down from 10.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FreeNAS is 4.0%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NAS Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dell PowerStore8.1%
FreeNAS4.0%
Other87.9%
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2304864 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vmware Windows Senior Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Resilience has supported proactive management and secured audit readiness across multiple sites
The resilience in Dell PowerStore benefits my company from an auditing perspective because we know we have that resilience in place. I see Dell PowerStore playing a bigger role in the future because we are starting to use it more, and that is pushing it. The biggest return on investment for me when using Dell PowerStore is scalability. Scalability is key. I can amplify that scalability is the biggest return on investment because we have redundancy between two sites; if something goes down, we have to manage it, but we want to do it proactively.
Vincenzo D'Aniello - PeerSpot reviewer
Software developer at TREXON S.R.L.
Open-source with great disk management and task synchronization
The system itself allows you to add any feature. The only bad thing is that this maybe depends on FreeBSD, and sometimes finding documentation is difficult. For example, we knew that previous versions automatically enabled the Linux kernel, yet with the recent version, this was no longer the case. Now, there was the possibility of being able to create Debian-based jails, and finding the documentation was not easy or fast. That said, in the end, we succeeded. If you find the documentation, it is always incomplete and fragmented.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Dell PowerStore has helped reduce my organization's capital expenditures because once the storage is made available to the VMware environment in a clustered way, it makes it easy for the end user or VMware administrator to deploy virtual machines instantly."
"Overall, we're quite happy with the product because we can move the data that is stored on more than 10 of our current storage devices to a single PowerStore."
"The PowerStore's compression ratio is even higher than the Unity system."
"The software upgrades are all included for no additional charge."
"While I note some potential for future enhancements, Dell PowerStore is already a leader in customer satisfaction."
"The most valuable features of Dell PowerStore are the resilience, scalability, flexibility of expansion, and ease of managing the entire solution including the servers and storage."
"Dell PowerStore has impacted my organization in terms of performance and operational efficiency, as the most important benefit regarding the upgrades allows you to get more storage in the same platform if you have larger needs in the future, so you don't have to buy everything again."
"The return on investment since switching to Dell PowerStore has been really good."
"The fact that no data are lost when a hard drive fails is extremely reassuring, as I have had two of five drives fail at one time and no data were lost."
"FreeNAS is much simpler and easier to use than other solutions, but we don't have the complete range of features that come with the full version."
"It integrates well into either Windows or Linux environments."
"Its stability is the most valuable. It is reliable, and we don't have to worry too much about it."
"The ease of use of the 'jail', the management of backups, and copies to easily create test and pre-production scenarios have speeded up the development and distribution of business apps."
"The stability is quite good; our system is in production and we have not had any problems with it, and when a drive fails, we don't really have any disruption because we can easily rebuild the disk, even if it is very large."
"The solution has been very stable so far."
"It has the best storage capacity."
 

Cons

"The price is on the higher side."
"We have not seen an ROI and it would be good to have an ROI calculator made available by Dell."
"I have some orders for failed batteries which I am still waiting on because I was told they are shipped via water."
"There are certain shortcomings with the technical support team of Dell PowerStore, where improvements are required."
"The upgrades themselves are running fine, but after the upgrade is when we have a problem. With the update to 1.4, we had a head crash. They told us, 'This is a known issue. Please upgrade to 2.' We upgraded to 2 and, one week later they told us, 'Yeah, there are some issues in 2.0.0. You can lose data. Please upgrade to 2.0.1.' Overall, they need to make the system stable."
"I am not satisfied with Dell PowerStore because of stability. Stability and complexity of some features and configurations are issues with Dell PowerStore."
"We experienced some concerns during a previous firmware upgrade when the controllers became unresponsive, which affected operations."
"In terms of improving Dell PowerStore, they should have simplified documents available for customers, not just for the support team."
"FreeNAS should be better prepared for clustering."
"The latest version of the dashboard doesn't work as good as the previous version. Sometimes we change our dashboard back to the previous version because the latest version just doesn't work as good."
"They can improve the integration with PSA systems. This functionality could be better."
"The one thing that I find difficult to do which is very time-consuming is that I like to have a backup of the important files."
"Its support for Hyper-V clusters."
"One of my hard drives has failed and the documentation that I've been able to find has not helped."
"They should include clustering for the solution."
"If you find the documentation, it is always incomplete and fragmented."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"With compression, we were able to have a solution within our company's budget. We include a clause in the contract with Dell that states if the compression ratio is not met, we will adjust the workload accordingly."
"The licensing for this solution is good and is in the mid-range tier."
"HCL Tech has a TLA with Dell, so in terms of price point, we are very competitive. Based on my experience, the cost of Dell PowerStore for around 500 GB of capacity is very competitive compared to any other platform in the market."
"We are currently using Dell PowerStore for our smaller storage and there is no competition for pricing."
"There's still a cap on the upgrade path, where you can consume all the engines within the frame before you have to go to another frame... Normally, we exceed the IOPS on the frames before we can ever exhaust the storage, so anything they can do to help us avoid stranded storage capacity, capacity that we couldn't get to, would be beneficial."
"The solution’s pricing is always too high."
"Pricing depends on the model and negotiation. Sometimes we manage to get good discounts, sometimes not."
"The pricing structure and licensing model of Dell PowerStore are very good and I like it. We chose it because it was reasonably priced and met our requirements"
"Its licensing cost is based on the hardware capacity."
"Its price is okay. It suits our needs."
"For our configuration, we pay a little bit less than €10,000 ($12,000 USD) per year."
"We use the free version of the program."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
20%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business83
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise124
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

What do you think about Dell EMC PowerStore? Is it actually a new product?
PowerStore is flexible, scalable, simple, and performant with market-leading economics for a wide range of legacy and next-gen apps. It is only Flash and can support many workloads from today's app...
How does Dell's EMC PowerStore compare with its EMC Unity XT?
Dell EMC PowerStore is a unified storage platform that has the added benefit of being scalable. The automated management of resources feature provides a more simple administration. I found the flex...
What's the difference between DELL EMC Powerstore and Powermax NVMe?
Dell PowerStore is an all-solid-state midrange storage system. It has many internal elements taken from other Dell offerings and integrated into the PowerStoreOS. The installation and setup have a ...
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Also Known As

PowerStore
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Morroni Technologies Inc., Creative Integrations
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerStore vs. FreeNAS and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.