Our Qnap 453D has four internal bays with 6TB HDD’s and two 2 TB internal NVMe’s’
I think of buying two external NVMe enclosures with 1 TB NVMe’s that will be connected with a USB 3.1 interface.
I would like to run the OS from the external enclosures in Raid1 and use the internal NVMe for docker data with lots of small files.
Does this make sense please? I hate to use the 2 TB drives just for the OS.
Thanks.
Qnap devices are equipped with their own operating system (QTS). Indeed, it is not so great as TrueNAS is 
, but it is enough for operation.
Do you plan to install TrueNAS at Qnap device?
Yes. It with be either unRAID or TrueNAS but I prefer TrueNAS EEL as it seems to allow more control over Docker. I have been waiting for QTSHero to become available on the 453D for almost a year. I don’t think think they’ll deliver as promised so it’s time to switch.
Truenas SCALE uses the boot pool alot more than CORE. It is not recommended to use USB attached discs, but for the bootpool the risks are IMO acceptable. Just make sure you keep an up to date config file and dont use a cheap flash storage device. Get a proper external SSD.
ZFS and hardware RAID are incompatibile. Please read Terminology and Abbreviations Primer | TrueNAS Community and iX's ZFS Pool Layout White Paper.
just my little experience: is an overkill.
An adapter of this kind
is cheap, reliable for the purpose, and easy to find pretty anywhere; plus a SATA small SSD that you can buy used or new (on aliexpress the 60-120gb are really really cheap).
Use the joe’s multireport script and you don’t neither need to mirror the boot pool, if in case of something goe’s wrong you can wait the 15-20 min that a clean install+config upload needs
Mind that the boot device is only that, a boot device, so 1 TB is massive overkill. Any cheap and small SSD will do.
These folks are not lying, way overkill!
