Create Pool error with a Raidz pool of 4 disks - help?

TrueNAS General
1

Dears,
Just started my installation of truenas and I run into issues with creating my pool

I have the latest Scale installed on proxmox 8.2.4. My disks have been added to my VM with the QM commands, and they all show nicely up in the disk page. All my disks have been previously used in OpenMediaVault in a Raid 5 setup.

I’m not overly concerned with data loss, so opted for Raidz1. When I select width 4, number of VDEV 1, and start the pool creation I get an error " Error: [EFAULT] Failed to wipe disk sdb: ‘ID_PART_ENTRY_NUMBER’". If I go back to the disks, 3 out of 4 show N/A in the pool colum, 1 shows the 1st pool I tried “Data (Exported)”. I tried to wipe it from the disks screen, and get the same error. I tried in the CLI with parted, remove all the partitions, try all over again and the issue persist. I tried this several time already. The 1st time I saw the error it was for 1 disk. Now it’s for another one, and the previous disks remains in N/A under the pool column.

I’m a bit at loss here. Don’t have much (none) experience with ZFS.

Thanks

2

Not a good start for ZFS…

You should not pass individual drives but pass through the whole SATA/SAS controller as PCIe device.

5

and one more thing. THANK YOU FOR THE QUICK REACTION :slight_smile:

6

Any doc you can share about this? I found pro’s & contra sharing the whole controller or individual drivers. And if I implement this, should I wait before I start loading my files on the pool?
The pool creation is fixed now after I ran dd zeros
And, a BIG THANK you for the quick reaction

7

I would suggest to destroy the pool and recreate it properly.

8

If you only have 4x disks, RAIDZ1 is probably OK.

The risk is that if you lose one drive and replace it, then the stress of resilvering that one drive will make another drive fail during the resilver, losing all your data. This risk depends on how many drives as well as the size of each drive and (of course) how old the drives are.

The key when you are using drives which have been used before is to ensure that their partition tables have been cleared. Use parted or gdisk to do this before you attempt to create a pool.

Everything is more complicated if you are using TrueNAS inside a VM - and IME this generally will mean that you need more expertise firstly to make it work, and secondly to make the redundancy and error recovery work (and test it before you use it in production because you do not want to find out that the ZFS recovery doesn’t work when you have a problem). Because it is specialising, Proxmox can probably do more for VMs than TrueNAS virtualisation support, but they are both based on KVM so their fundamental capabilities will be similar - however if TrueNAS VMs can achieve what you want then IMO you might be better off using TrueNAS as the virtualisation platform rather than Proxmox (simply because it keeps it simpler).

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