Can Seagate BarraCuda 2TB Internal Hard Drives be used for another Nas server for backup

TrueNAS General
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Hello I want to know if these Seagate BarraCuda 2TB Internal Hard Drives can be be used for a True Nas server just for a backup server. The reason I am asking is when I setup my True Nas server these drives did not work well with True Nas

If I setup another machine with True Nas it would not be on 24/7 only to backp my main Nas system

I have at least 14 TB of drives I would like to put to good use, maybe to backup my Nas from time to time

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A lot of the Barracuda line are SMR drives. I believe @Arwen uses SMR drives as a backup storage drive with TrueNAS.

Wish I could be of more help.

1 Like
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Thank you Joe much appreciated. When I created my Nas system I started out with these drives but got all kinds of error messages. So I upgraded to WD Red Plus 4TB and everything is good now

But I figured using them for a backup they might be useful they are all brand new drives not used

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Diversify. Format them as XFS or exFAT. Use them only to backup extremely valuable data.[1]

Since they are SMR drives, I would not use them in ZFS and definitely not in any sort of vdev.

  1. These wouldn’t be your main backups. It’s assumed you already have proper backups. ↩︎

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Can Seagate BarraCuda 2TB Internal Hard Drives be used for

Not at all in fact I am not using them right now. I just wanted to know if they could be used some how for storing data

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You can format them as XFS or Ext4 on the Ubuntu server. If you need encryption, you can use LUKS.

Have them mounted with the noatime mount parameter.

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Would this be possible?
Take a drive, shove it into the TrueNAS machine, using gdisk to remove any partitions, then create a new partition. Then use mkfs.ext4 to format that partition.

Now that you have a drive, we will call it /dev/sdx and you would have a drive you could drop data on. Not via SMB but through local rsync for example.

I have no idea if that would work. I may try when I retire my Core machine and harvest the drives.

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I use 2 x SMR drives, with ZFS, both from Seagate. (Well, the 2.5" 2TB laptop drive was originally designed by Samsung… but is labeled Seagate.)

However, neither is in use with TrueNAS directly. The Seagate 8TB Archive drive is offline backup only, and gets used every few months to, well, backup. The 2.5" 2TB laptop drive is in a miniature PC used for my media and file repository.

Both work fine for their intended use, (low use). Neither is fast, and if / when I have to replace them, it will be without SMR.

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Thank you for sharing your use of those drives much appreciated