Change to new system and retain data

TrueNAS General
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My existing hardware
Asrock EP2C602-4L/D16 with 2 x Intel Xeon e5-2670 CPUs
128GB quad ECC DDR3 Ram
6 x 3Tb WD Red in RAIDZ2 (storage)
1 x 120GB Kingston V400 SSD (boot)

I might be running FreeNAS 11.3 or may have upgraded to TrueNAS Core. Ultimately I want to shift to TrueNAS scale (or whatever that is called these days).

My hardware is boot looping and I have been unable to diagnose the cause to date (a mate is going to look at it when he has time). If however I need to get new hardware, can I just swap over the HDDs and boot drive to new hardware and it will work without any dramas?

If I get new hardware it is likely to be along these lines: An MATX board with integrated CPU, 6+ SATA ports and 16Gb ECC DDR4.

That is on the surface a significant downgrade in RAM (despite shift to DDR4) but given there’s unlikely to ever be more than three concurrent streams (generally two or one), Is it likely adequate for the task?

Anyway comments and suggestions are welcome.

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It’s going to depend on the reason for the boot looping. If it is the storage pool that is somehow damaged, you might not be able to get the data moved.

If your storage pool is good, you should be able to do a fresh install of a current TrueNAS Scale version and the system should import the pool or you might have to manually do it in the GUI. You would still have to go through and set up users, sharing, etc to the newer way that Scale does.

I don’t think you would have problems with a memory downgrade unless you were running a bunch of VMs or something.

If you need the download link to Core and earlier versions, here it is. It can be a bit hard to find.

1 Like
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Thank you.

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Do you have backups of important data?