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Dell PowerMax vs TrueNAS F-Series comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
233
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd)
Dell PowerMax
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (5th), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
TrueNAS F-Series
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (20th)
 

Featured Reviews

Cristian Ion - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Information Technology Engineer at Eta2u
All-flash storage has unified my clients’ workloads and has reduced TCO through efficient data services
The pricing and licensing of Everpure FlashArray is a problem because Everpure is considered more expensive than competitors. IBM, Lenovo, and Dell are more aggressive on prices. It is a very complicated market, especially now, and I understand the prices are higher at Everpure because of the software and all the enhancements it has. However, in this competitive market, we have a big problem selling to customers that are on a tight budget. A product with better pricing would be a win in the end. The RC or C20, for example, was a very good product that I could sell more easily than other options. Everpure FlashArray//C is sufficient for most workloads and virtualization workloads if you do not have very large databases. A product like that helps, and perhaps a new product in the future that is a little cheaper than the current options would be a possibility to gain more market share. I see the return on investment clearly from using Everpure FlashArray, but the challenge is selling it to customers for the first time. There are many customers who fall in the sweet spot where they are too small for an X or even a C model. They need something a little cheaper, they have the money for a cheaper version, and they need the performance of a Pure system. These customers could be more easily approached if Everpure offers a version of a local device in the future that is even cheaper than the C-class. I am trying now to help customers understand the concept behind AG1. I know that AG1 is not profitable if capacity is less than 50 terabytes. However, some customers would be very willing to pay for 25 terabytes in a cloud operated by Pure and to have it accessible with very good speed. We will see what the future brings.
Gouranga Maiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Project Manager IT at ITC Ltd
High‑performance all‑flash storage has transformed data warehousing and reporting speed
The features of Dell PowerMax that I find most valuable so far include its all-flash capability, along with its performance, reliability, and efficiency. Additionally, it has snapshot-level features that allow me to take snapshots or backups within only a few seconds. There is no need to wait long, and unnecessary high bandwidth used for backup does not occur because I can take the whole snapshot backup within a fraction of a second. I have used the deduplication feature of Dell PowerMax. Deduplication and compression are very effective, so despite my large amount of data, the effective size is reduced due to this deduplication and compression, allowing me to store more data on the same storage. Regarding the impact of Dell PowerMax's real-time data encryption on my data protection strategies, I have not used that feature personally. However, in another department, my colleagues are using it, and they have not faced any performance bottlenecks due to data encryption. The encryption is very powerful, but I have not implemented that encryption in our database data warehouse systems since they are for internal use only, not exposed worldwide. At first, I faced several issues, and our report rendering complaints were quite annoying. However, now with Dell PowerMax storage's high IOPS handling capabilities, the output comes within a fraction of a second, making our users happy. Whatever our requirement or demand is, it has already been implemented in Dell PowerMax with its all-flash NVMe storage. New bricks can also be added if a size increase is required, allowing for additional bricks to be added as needed. Everything is in place; therefore, I do not think any other improvements are required. However, it is worth noting that Dell is continuously inventing and releasing more powerful types of storage. This results in increased reliability, enhanced data handling capabilities, improved deduplication ratios, and the fulfillment of more IOPS demand.
TM
Engineer at Fairway-corp
A storage solution for file sharing with unified storage
We use the solution for file sharing We like TrueNAS because of the services it offers. TrueNAS F-Series provides unified storage. We can run an SMB server, enabling connections through Windows. Additionally, it supports VNAC. We are using all hardware but use those features sparingly. However,…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It does everything they say it will do: It's very cost-effective compared to other big players, integrates very well with VMware, is tiny so we're saving power and space in the data center, and it's really easy for us to manage."
"We have looked at all of the platforms, and to see what Pure was able to do within a PoC environment meant that we never turned back our PoC environment."
"I find Pure Storage FlashArray to be much better than traditional storage because it has a GUI interface. It makes the process of allocating the storage much easier, and most activities are automated. It is like clicking a button for every task."
"Pure Storage has the right business model and will be around for a long time."
"Pricing is very competitive, and it's better than other competitors, as we've looked at some of the other competitors on the market."
"It makes things ten times easier."
"We find the ease of usability and setup valuable."
"We currently have four Pure Storage FlashArray boxes, and all the storage boxes are on an Evergreen subscription model where we receive the latest hardware and features without any cost in a completely non-intrusive task."
"Performance and management aspects are satisfactory."
"The main improvement for us is that we have seen up to 12x performance improvements after moving from earlier, mid-range Dell EMC storage to PowerMax."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the data reduction ratio."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the latency, performance, and footprints, which means I can store a large amount of data."
"The stability is great. It is five nines."
"The response time, compared to XtremIO, is far better."
"We used to have a VMAX 20K but we have just upgraded, and moved two or three generations ahead to PowerMax, and the response time is great."
"My storage engineers are very happy with PowerMax. They are very pleased with the performance, decreased latency, and dependability. From the team, the RESTful API makes management so much easier for them versus the command line interface."
"It provides unified storage."
 

Cons

"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"There are a lot of things to improve."
"I would like to see data tiering to AWS."
"They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth."
"I would like a feature to integrate with external or cloud solutions. For example, if I want to use this storage for a backup from the cloud, I want to have integration with the cloud vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracles, or Amazon. It could be available as an API to allow seamless integration. Additionally, the solution could improve by having native integration with a cloud provider, such as VMware or Microsoft, this would reduce the need to use third-party solutions to complete the task."
"It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do."
"Self-backup is the only feature lacking in this solution."
"I would like to see them develop the ability to integrate with more AWS services."
"The technical support is lacking. We are working with Dell EMC to get some better understanding of this."
"One area for improvement would be integration with public cloud services. Compared to competitors such as NetApp, which integrates with public cloud hyperscalers (GCP, Azure, AWS), Dell PowerMax lacks in this aspect."
"Support of the product can be slow and an administrative challenge: planning, scheduling, and overseeing data center access for a Dell EMC rep."
"The NVMe integration could be improved."
"There is also room for improvement in the PowerMax architecture and hardware itself. They should design the PowerMax on the basis of PCIe 4.0. I would like to see the possibility of an NVMe drive that operates on PCIe 4.0 and not PCIe 3.0."
"I think management is where PowerMax is weakest. We're still managing it like we managed EMC arrays in the early 2000s. There's a slicker, fancier GUI that does more things, but at the end of the day, you still have to dig into the command line and issue a lot of the same commands that we still were using almost 20 years ago."
"With PowerMax, I requested this for every 15 minutes, keeping it for a week. The engineer's answer was, "There will be too many snapshots. It might slow down the system.""
"Dell PowerMax can be improved because there are very strict guidelines when it comes to installation and the amount of control a customer has."
"The solution’s UI could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You get what you pay for. It is expensive, but it really works."
"While it comes with a higher price tag, this investment often translates to significant improvements in performance."
"When you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it."
"Pure has been flexible with us on the pricing models."
"The cost was initially high, but once more people were using it, the costs came down. This was because the University was reselling it to other departments."
"The guaranty that Pure Storage provides when you purchase it doesn't meet the overall capacity needs to provide extra storage, if needed. Thus, it is not meeting our expectations."
"The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive."
"Cost-wise, it's been very effective."
"I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a five out of ten for pricing."
"From reclaiming data center space which is so tightly constrained these days, it will pay for itself in a short amount of time, which is fantastic. Anything we can do to get more out of our current physical data center space helps us a ton, and PowerMax has helped enable that."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"Our costs for the product are three million."
"Support pricing is very high. Our support contract is about to expire and Dell EMC provided us with an extremely high renewal quote. It was four times more than the support contract for our previous EMC VNX solution."
"The pricing is comparable to other vendors."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe's price is expensive."
"Since Dell PowerMax NVMe is an enterprise storage, its price is premium."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business74
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise161
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise64
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
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 of...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?
My experience with the pricing of Dell PowerMax is that there is a good relationship between the pricing and the func...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?
One area where Dell PowerMax can improve is the relationship between physical space and capacity, as well as electric...
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Dell PowerMax NVMe, Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Rackspace, Open Line
1. Acronis 2. Acumatica 3. Atlassian 4. Autodesk 5. Barracuda Networks 6. Cisco Systems 7. Cloudflare 8. Dell EMC 9. DigitalOcean 10. Equinix 11. Google Cloud Platform 12. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 13. IBM 14. Inspur 15. Intel 16. Juniper Networks 17. Konica Minolta 18. Linode 19. Malwarebytes 20. Microsoft Azure 21. NetApp 22. Oracle 23. Palo Alto Networks 24. Red Hat 25. Rackspace 26. SAP 27. ServiceNow 28. SolarWinds 29. VMware 30. Western Digital 31. Xerox
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Nutanix and others in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays. Updated: October 2026.
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