I have my DIY NAS that began as FreeNas and is now TrueNAS Core v. 12. When I built the box it was recommended to install FreeNAS on a 16 GB thumb drive, which 8 years later turns out to be kind of a bad idea. I have backed up the critical files locally, but have a bunch of media that is not terribly important but I’d rather not lose it. The media files amount to close to 3TB and I don’t really have another place to store them, so ideally the existing storage pool will survive this update. I’m running a Celeron processor, with ECC memory on a mini ITX mobo that has only 6 SATA ports, all of which are used by the storage pool disks (Raid 5 I think, but maybe Raid 6).
The boot pool is experiencing errors and may fail completely soon. I have backed up the config with a secret seed in hopes of importing later to keep using the storage pool as is.
I’m thinking that my sequence will be: buy a pcie 2 port sata card and use 2 SSDs for a mirrored boot pool, on which I install the latest CORE version. then import my config and presto I should be back. My boot drive is bad enough now that i don’t trust the upgrade to work.
Will my config from a previous version import into the latest CORE system? Or should I find an install that matches my current version?
your plan SHOULD work if done as you described. i would download an older version that matches your current and use the in system upgrade path for highest chance of compatibility
make sure you are not using hardware raid for the boot pool. install to a single disk and add the second disk to the boot pool after install.
hopefully you meant a Z1 or z2 pool and not raid 5 or 6 for your data pool.
truenas does NOT play well with any kind of hardware raid whether in boot pool or dataset. unfortunately if it was set up with HW raid you would need to offload the data so you can reconfigure the disks. before moving the data back.
here are previous versions of truenas. https://download.freenas.org/
My current setup with the boot on a USB thumb drive is essentially a solid state boot drive on the USB. My boot volume keeps getting unrecoverable errors and the stability of USB media seems to be the culprit which is why I’m moving to a SATA SSD boot volume.
Yes, I do mean software raid, rather than hardware. I guess I don’t quite remember how it all hooks up, but I have 6 2TB disks and the configuration is similar to Raid 5 in that I can lose 2 disks without losing data (IIRC). Once I get it going again (in the meantime the NAS went down and will not reboot) I will see what the zpool configuration reports from the terminal.
the usb ssd would likely work but at the same time i have seen problems with the USB controllers randomly changing addresses etc so i did not suggest it myself.
if reliability is your deciding factor, the SSD’s would work best.
Success! One thing that I did not anticipate was the pcie card I used to get 4 more sata ports does not support booting. So I put the boot drive (just single right now) on one of the motherboard sata ports (6 total) so one of my storage pool drives is on the sata card. I don’t see any issues with it, initial checks show the files are all there. Is there any concern regarding the different sata connections, or is it all really just the same? They are all sata III btw.
Not really so long as your card isn’t doing any funny business. One of the nice things TrueNAS does is ensure the pool is mounted/defined by UID instead of by SD#, so as long as the disks are present in some fashion it will recognize them just fine.
