Hi, I’m embarking on a journey to build a new storage solution and I have landed on TrueNAS Scale. My old storage array is actually a RAID 6 built on the adaptec 5805 raid card I got in 2008. I read on the forums and also for obvious reasons, one shouldn’t use a raid card with TrueNAS for the storage pools, which makes complete sense.
What I am thinking is about the transfer of the data from old array to the new storage pool. I could do it over the network at 2.5 gig based upon the old hardware’s transfer speeds.
But I had an idea of moving over the raid card to TrueNAS and accessing the array in read-only mode. Then perform the transfer though my new build and hardware and skipping the network.
I am interested in your experiences and whether this is a terrible idea that will end up in catastrophe and I lose my original data or if it is an idea worth exploring further.
My first thought is that you should backup your data before you do anything with it; I haven’t got a second thought because I’m out of my depth and can’t advise - sorry!
Posting all the details on your hardware of your current and future setups would help make informed decisions. Models of hard drives allow us to rule out SMR vs CMR drives. SMR is not suited for ZFS use. Number of hard drives and pool layouts. Motherboards and SAS HBA cards let us figure capacity and PCI slots, etc
New build:
CPU: AMD EPYC 9334 (32-core, PCIe 5.0)
Motherboard: Supermicro H13SSL-N (BMC, IPMI, PCIe Gen5)
Memory: (ECC) 576GB (12 x 48GB) Micron DDR5 ECC RDIMM
Cache Drives (SLOG) 2 x 1.8TB NVMe M.2 SSDs (Mirrored)
Main Storage Pool: 5 x 24TB Seagate Exos HDDs (RAIDZ2)
Power Supply: Corsair AX1600i (Fully Modular, Titanium Rated)
HBA Card: Broadcom LSI 9500-16i
Network Card: Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx (10GbE SFP+)
CPU Cooler: SilverStone XE04-SP5
Boot Drives: 2 x 256GB SATA SSDs (Mirrored)
Chassis: 45Drives HL15
Old Build
CPU: Intel(R) Core™ i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz
Motherboard: ASRock z390 taichi
Memory: 64 Gig DDR 4 2133 M/T
Main Storage Pool: 8 x 10 TB Western Digital Red HDDs (RAID6)
HBA Card: Adaptec 5805
Network Card: uni USB-C to Ethernet Adapter 2.5 Gbps
CPU Cooler: a noctua
Boot Drives: Samsung evo 860 1TB
Chassis: Some older cooler master
Your SLOG may need to be changed. Do you have a use case that requires synchronous writes? It also should be sized appropriately, over provisioned.
Probably best doing network transfer. Hoping your Old Build NIC would prove to be stable. You may even consider getting a 10G fiber NIC for your old build just to do the transfer. Is borrowing from someone else and option?
Linking some articles or posts but most likely just the last one for SLOG
If you end up with something like an Intel x520, they like to see the transceivers coded ‘Intel’. I was able to bypass it under TrueNAS Core / FreeBSD but not under Windows and had to order a different transceiver.
If your Mellanox NIC wasn’t too expensive, that may be a good choice if they aren’t transceiver locked models and can use generic.
I got my transceiver from 10GTek on Amazon but there are other suppliers too. FS.com is another I have heard recommended.
You can’t do that because TrueNAS doesn’t support any file system but ZFS: It can’t read your array.
As said: Possibly not needed. If needed, PLP is required, mirrorring is not, and used capacity would be around 10 GB (so MASSIVE overkill/overprovisioning here).
