Disk partitions

TrueNAS General
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New to TrueNAS. I happen to have a spare 1TB SSD lying around, so I thought of using that to start me a NAS, with an eye to adding some NVMEs to it in the near future, when the prices come down. Bought all the stuff, and installed TruNAS, and everything went smoothly. To my surprise, however, now I learn that I will not be able to (officially) use the drive to store … anything but the system(!). I thus have to waste a whole 1TB for something that barely requires 20GB! Am I the only one who finds this … unsettling? At the very least, I should be able to install some apps on the empty space.

I am, thus, looking for some advice as to how to partition the drive–hopefully using TrueNAS CLI or whatever. Is there anywhere a tutorial in this respect? I know that this is meshugge by current TrueNAS orthodoxy, however, TrueNAS devs should keep in mind that this scenario will start happening more and more often seeing as it’s getting harder and harder to find drives smaller than 1TB for sale. Surely I am not the only one who thinks that using a whole 1TB drive to store a meager 20GB OS is a waste, am I? :thinking:

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No, but it’s still the way TrueNAS works. Don’t like it? Use a different NAS OS.

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I would suggest acquiring another small SSD to use as a boot disk.

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Just my point of view:
small SSD (but NVME too) are hard to find new, and often neither cheap compared to “bigger”… But from my experience there are a lot of those used, in good condition.
Either a cheap AliExpress SSD/nvme disk can handle good the boot (mine 5€ 60gb SSD Is there from months without issue).
What maybe you should think about, for me, Is waste a SATA Port (or worst, a NVME slot), for boot :melting_face:
Small SSD Is IMHO the best choice… On Need, with a 3€ SATA to USB, you can save a slot

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17 € for 128GB SATA SSD on Amazon.
I prefer using internal USB ports and quality USB drives though.

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Point taken, thanks. I am certainly not blaming the devs. for their decision. We’ll just have to learn to live with it, and adapt.

Now, where was that partitioning tutorial please? Any links?

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At your own risk

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Thanks! As far as I can tell, these tutorials reference FreeBSD: are they not obsolete? (Using TrueNAS Scale myself.)

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They are perfectly current for CORE. Translate as needed for SCALE…

But do yourself a favour: Get a cheap boot device (my favourites are 16 GB Optane M10), use TrueNAS as it’s designed to be used, and make your life easier for less than $10.

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Scale process is quite different. It involves modifying the installer script during installation.

It is documented in a thread. I don’t have a link handy.

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Is it this one?

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I think that’s for core.

This one details a few ways. And links to a Reddit post.

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Looks like the definitive tutorial is this one.

This is what I distilled:

# To be run manually.
# vi /usr/sbin/truenas-install
sed -i “s/sgdisk -n3:0:0 -t3:BF01/sgdisk -n3:0:+100GiB -t3:BF01/g” “/usr/sbin/truenas-install”
/usr/sbin/truenas-install

# Do a shutdown and remove the TrueNAS installation kit drive. Start TrueNAS box.

zpool status boot-pool
lsblk
fdisk -l
sgdisk -n5:0:+100GiB -t5:BF01 /dev/sda
# sgdisk -n6:0:0 -t6:BF01 /dev/sda
partprobe
fdisk -lx /dev/sda
zpool create -f nas0_app /dev/disk/by-partuuid/<sda5_uuid>
# zpool create -f nas0_data /dev/disk/by-partuuid/<sda6_uuid>
zpool export nas0_app
# zpool export nas0_data
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