Adding Drives and Upgrade Challenges

TrueNAS General
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1

Evening TrueNAS experts!

I’ve been running TrueNAS as my home shared drive for mostly documents, music, and photos. I’ve just rehoused my system to enable some upgrades and I’m running into a few challenges.

System Info

  • i5 with 8gb, Micro ATX board
  • Jonsbo N6 case with SATA backplane
  • OS Drive (just the OS): 250gb SATA
  • Current Storage Drive: 1x 2TB WD Red, about 1/2 full
  • TrueNAS: TrueNAS-SCALE-22.02.4
  • Pool: “mediapool” with SMB shares, just the single drive

I’ve just added in 2 more 2TB drives (TrueNAS sees them, but they’re just hanging out) and have two challenges:

  • I want max capacity out of the 3 drives, thinking RAIDZ1 (RAID 5) for 4TB.
  • The current pool is backed up, so that drive can be wiped and reassigned/formatted.
  • The OS won’t upgrade past TrueNAS-SCALE-22.02.4 using the “Update” feature.

So the two things I need some help with:

  1. How do I get all 3 drives (with potential to add more) working together for max capacity and good resiliency?
  2. What’s up with the updates not working?

Appreciate the help for the dumb new guy!

2

What are you seeing on the updates? Do you not have any update choices or are you getting errors?
There is the option of manual upgrades or a backup of your System Configuration, a new install over the boot device with a newer version, like 25.10.8 and then restoring the configuration.

I am hoping you have only data and do not have any VMs or Apps in use. You are so far behind on the version that I think you will have to redo any of those,

8GB is the min for RAM listed in the current docs.

If you have all data backed up elsewhere, you can just destroy your current pool and do a complete new install along with creating a new 3 wide Raid-Z1 pool and setting up SMB again. That’s another option from upgrading.

I would suggest checking your drive models to make sure they are CMR types and not SMR as SMR and ZFS don’t work well together.

Adding link for the downloads in case you can’t find the earlier versions. You should be able to find manual upgrade files, etc.

3

This OS is almost five years old, so the update trains might not be available, but you’d need to change the update train to a more recent version. Can you do that, or do they just not show?

4

The train shows, and I even tried to manually load the 25.10 iso image but the system didn’t take it and said it couldn’t directly update. The update utility shows the 24 update from the 22, but that fails as well.

5

In this case, really the simplest thing to do would be a fresh installation of 25.10.8, create a new pool on your three drives (assuming they’re all CMR), restore from backup, and set up your users/shares again.

6

Make a backup of your configuration file via the GUI. Then download the version iso you want and burn that to a bootable drive, typically a USB Flash drive.

Install the new version in your current boot drive. Reboot.

Log into your NAS using the new IP address provided.

Upload your previously saved Config file.

Basically a new install and then you restore your config file.

Very easy and good to figure out sooner than later.

Once done, you can focus on changing your pool.

Takel one problem until it is completed.

7

Lemme jump in on the OS update first, then we’ll see how the chaos progresses.

Thanks!

8

If you haven’t destroyed the existing pool yet AND you have an additional 2-TB drive, you can also try the following fairly safe method (which I’ve successfully done myself):

  • Perform a fresh installation with the existing configuration, as previously recommended
  • Import the existing pool.
  • Stop all sharing services (SMB, NFS, etc.) individually and set them to NOT start at boot. Then disable the service entirely.
  • Export the pool.
  • Rename the existing pool in the shell (admin shell), e.g., “Move.”
  • Create the new pool as RAID-Z1 as desired, using the existing name.
  • Then create the required datasets 1:1 on the new pool. (This also gives you the option to redistribute or nest the datasets differently… the shares can be adjusted. Only the datasets themselves should retain their original structure if ACLs were set up there. Those take work…)
  • Import the renamed pool with the existing data and replicate the existing data to the new pool.
  • Then, if necessary, adjust the permissions one by one and reactivate them.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

9

I’ve done the clean install, rebuilt the pool from scratch to a RAIDZ1 with 3ea 2TB, and it’s running well enough. The shares and ACL were a bit off from the import, so I’m still repairing that mess but so far it’s stable.

Now to find a decent utility that’ll clear all the duplicate files out since I likely moved some things twice.