Read this article in French: TrueNAS 27 RC.1 disponible : nouveautés et renommage depuis TrueNAS 26
iXsystems published “TrueNAS 27 is Here!” on its blog on October 5, 2026. The short version: the release that had been tracked in development as TrueNAS 26 is now called TrueNAS 27, and it just entered its Release Candidate phase with RC.1. If you want the backstory on how TrueNAS got from a hobbyist firewall side project to where it is now, we covered that in our TrueNAS History piece. This is simply the next chapter.
Why 26 became 27
Nothing about the release schedule changed here, only the number. iXsystems is switching to one major TrueNAS version a year, and it’s changing what that number means: instead of naming a release after the year and month its development started (the old 25.10-style scheme), the major version now reflects the year most people will actually be running it. A build that spends 2026 in development and testing will mostly end up in production during 2027, so iXsystems jumped straight from TrueNAS 26 to TrueNAS 27 to reflect that. RC.1 ships on the same timeline it always would have; it just has a different name on it.
What’s actually new in RC.1
Here’s what iXsystems’ feature-set post describes, and what Phoronix and StorageReview both confirmed in their own coverage on October 5–6, 2026:
- TrueSearch: server-side indexing of file names, metadata, and file contents, with optional Spotlight support for macOS clients connecting over SMB. It requires TrueNAS Connect, and encrypted datasets aren’t indexed.
- WebShare: browser-based access to stored data that keeps existing ACLs and permissions intact. Like TrueSearch, it needs TrueNAS Connect.
- Fusion Pools 2.0: special vdevs can now use RAIDZ and double as a ZFS intent log chain for synchronous writes when there’s no dedicated log device available. This update also adds Live Dataset Tiering, which shifts data between flash and capacity storage without taking anything offline.
- Stateful SMB failover: on Enterprise HA systems, SMB client sessions now survive a failover between controllers instead of getting dropped.
- TrueNAS Object Interface: an early-access, S3-compatible object storage service where each bucket is a ZFS dataset under the hood. Versioning and Object Lock need TrueNAS Connect Plus or Enterprise, and iXsystems isn’t calling this production-ready until sometime in 2027.
- OpenZFS 2.4: deduplication that iXsystems says runs up to 25% faster, AVX2-accelerated encryption, default dataset quotas, schedulable scrubs, and a reworked write allocator.
- Linux kernel 6.18: better support for Broadcom tri-mode HBAs, PCIe Gen5 hardware, and recent NVIDIA GPUs, plus full LXC container support.
For home labs, the kernel bump and OpenZFS 2.4 are probably the parts worth paying attention to first. Newer hardware support (PCIe Gen5 boards, current NVIDIA cards, full LXC) matters more to someone running a DIY build than TrueNAS Object Interface does right now, since that one is explicitly still early access. TrueSearch and WebShare both sound genuinely useful for a home NAS, but tying them to TrueNAS Connect means self-hosters who want to stay fully offline will need to weigh that trade-off before turning them on.
It’s a release candidate, not a production build
iXsystems is aiming for a stable TrueNAS 27.0 release in early December 2026. RC.1 is meant for testing and early adopters, and the company says plainly that production systems should wait for the final build. If you’re curious about TrueNAS 27, this is a good time to try it on a spare machine and see how the new features behave. It’s not yet the version you want anywhere near data you can’t afford to lose.
Full details are available in iXsystems’ own posts, TrueNAS 27 is Here! and the TrueNAS 27 RC.1 feature-set breakdown, with additional independent coverage from Phoronix and StorageReview.