Boot from the installation media. You’ll see the installation welcome menu.<\/p>\n

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Hit “Enter” to continue.\u00a0 The install, reboot, or shutdown menu appears.<\/p>\n

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We’re going to install, so highlight option 1 and press “Enter.” The disk selection screen appears.<\/p>\n

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We’re installing TrueNAS CORE on the first drive. Highlight the first drive and hit “Space” to select it. Then press “Enter.” TrueNAS CORE reminds you that the drive will be wiped, and gives you chance to back out.<\/p>\n

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Highlight the “Yes” option and press “Enter.” The root password screen appears.<\/p>\n

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Type in a password for the TrueNAS CORE root user. Make sure you remember the password. You’re going to need it to log into TrueNAS CORE. You must type it twice.<\/p>\n

Highlight the “OK” button and press “Enter.” The boot type menu will appear. You can choose to boot your TrueNAS CORE in UEFI or BIOS modes.<\/p>\n

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Select either “Boot with UEFI” or “Boot with BIOS” according to the vintage of your TrueNAS CORE computer, then press “Enter.” The installation process will start. It completes surprisingly quickly. When it has completed you’ll see the installation completed notification screen.<\/p>\n

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Press “Enter.” The install, reboot, or shutdown menu appears.<\/p>\n

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Highlight option 3, press “Enter”, and eject the installation media. The computer will reboot and start TrueNAS CORE. The first time TrueNAS CORE boots it takes longer than usual because one-time configuration steps are performed. Very shortly you’ll see the TrueNAS CORE boot menu.<\/p>\n

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Press “Enter” or wait five seconds to boot into TrueNAS CORE. Presently you’ll see the TrueNAS CORE console application.<\/p>\n

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The only thing you need to take note of here is the IP address of the web interface.<\/p>\n

Configuring TrueNAS CORE<\/h2>\n

Enter the IP address of the TrueNAS Core computer into the browser of another computer on the same network. We’re using an Ubuntu computer. The TrueNAS Core login window appears.<\/p>\n

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Enter “root” as the username and use the password you created earlier. Once you’re authenticated and logged in, you’ll see the TrueNAS CORE dashboard.<\/p>\n

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The main display contains panels of information. They show the real-time status of your TrueNAS CORE installation. For example, here is the memory panel:<\/p>\n

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There’s a side-panel at the left-hand edge of the display. It holds a list of options. You’ll use these options to configure your TrueNAS CORE. Here’s the top of that list of options.<\/p>\n

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Notice that the name of the currently logged-in user and the network name of the TrueNAS CORE computer are shown above the options.<\/p>\n

Setting Up a Pool<\/h3>\n

A pool is a collection of hard drives that have been added to a single virtual device. The device is treated as if it were a single drive, and the ZFS file system handles the distribution of the data across the different physical drives.<\/p>\n

In the options list select Storage > Pools. There are no pools in the system yet.<\/p>\n

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Click the blue “Add” button at the far right of the display. You can import an existing pool or create a new pool.<\/p>\n

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We need to create a pool, so accept the defaults and click the “Create Pool” button. The “Pool Manager” window appears. You need to name your pool. We used “pool1.”<\/p>\n

The available hard drives are listed for you. The computer we’re using has two 500 GB hard drives in it for data storage.<\/p>\n

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If you click the “Suggest Layout” button TrueNAS CORE will make a sensible choice of combination of drives, RAID, and mirroring.<\/p>\n

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In our example, it used both drives in a virtual device and mirrored them. This gives 100% redundancy because both disks are a copy of each other. Our storage capacity is (almost) 500 GB, the same as one of the mirrored drives.<\/p>\n

Click the blue “Create” button to create our new pool. A confirmation window appears.<\/p>\n

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Click the “Confirm” checkbox and click the “Create Pool” button. The data drives are formatted to ZFS during this step. Our new pool, “pool1”, is listed in the pool list.<\/p>\n

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Creating Datasets<\/h3>\n

We’re now going to create a dataset in our pool. A dataset is a ZFS construction that behaves like a filesystem. Click the three-dotted menu button over to the far right of the “pool1” line.<\/p>\n

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Select “Add Dataset” from the drop-down menu. The “Name and Options” dialog appears.<\/p>\n

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You need to name your dataset. We’ve used “dataset1.” Enter whatever you think will be useful to you in the comment field. You can accept all the other defaults and click the blue “Submit” button at the bottom of the dialog box.<\/p>\n

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Our new dataset, “dataset1”, is listed as a child of our pool, “pool1.”<\/p>\n

Now we’re going to create another dataset inside “dataset1.” This will be where a user called “dave” is going to store his data. Click the three-dotted menu button over to the far right of the “dataset1” line, then click “Add Dataset” in the drop-down menu.<\/p>\n

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We called our new dataset “dave-data”, added a comment, and accepted all other defaults. Click the blue “Submit” button at the bottom of the dialog box.<\/p>\n

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Our “dave-data” dataset is listed as a child of “dataset1.”<\/p>\n

If you have several users who will use the TrueNAS Core, create more datasets—one per user—as children of “dataset1.” That way they can share the storage capacity of “dataset1” but only see their own files. We’ve only got a single user so we don’t need to create more datasets.<\/p>\n