Hello, I have read a little so far and I am not sure if I have understood the information correctly.
TrueNas cannot be installed on a USB stick?
I have read that it is theoretically possible but you should move the logs to an internal HDD because of the accesses. But I couldn’t find any instructions on how to install Truenas on a USB stick
i have now installed it on an old laptop for testing. As soon as I close the lid, the laptop goes into sleep mode. I have not found anything to disable this behavior. Is that possible?
i plan to replace my Synology Nas
3.1 Can I use a HDD enclosure where I use 2x12TB hard disks in Raid 1 mode which is connected to the laptop via USB?
3.2 What alternative would there be to usb connection?
I have 3 miniservers here that I would like to replace. An old Synology Nas with 4x4TB IronWolf currently serves as storage. However, I have to back up the data first, as it is operated in SHR1. Therefore, as I have read, I cannot simply use it with TrueNas.
If I don’t replace the servers, then all I really need is a storage that makes the data available to my servers. However, I don’t know how best to realize this.
A laptop with Truenas and connect the hard disks via usb?
A Raspberry Pi? I don’t need any powerful hardware, as my servers actually take care of it.
I was edit this file /etc/systemd/logind.conf and add: HandleLidSwitch=ignore - I found that here: askubuntu
And it seems working. For my tests its a good way. Its not a live System and just for testing and learning.
Why you say “no” ? It is really not possible to connect a 3,5" HDD case with 2 HDDs about USB and use it as pool?
USB connection is bit more slow but it is in genereal not possible yeah ?
If i need think about a different way.
Maybe i backup all my synology data to external hdd and recreate the pool from shr1 to raid5 (4HDDs and 1 for failure)
Can you recommend any hardware that will make my goals achievable?
A network storage that makes the data available via SMB or NFS for my servers?
An enclosure for 3.5” hdds or an alternative to my Synology DS414?
How many drives? Any other need?
There are many build threads here and on the old forum, including one specifically on small NAS cases. You may find some ideas there.
The Sabrent 10-bay powered enclosure works extremely well. SATA-III drives require no trays or tools to install, but you need adapter trays (about $10 each) and a screwdriver to insert 2.5" SSDs into the enclosure. Notably, the enclosure can power individual drives on and off, and seems to do a good job with power distribution and cooling. The enclosure supports drive spin-down and appears to support various drive power modes and spin-up groups, but I don’t set them to avoid latency issues or other potential problems.
The primary downside is that the enclosure has only a single USB-C 3.2 Gen. 1 port (10 Gbps), so you can’t daisy chain and shouldn’t expect Thunderbolt 3 speeds, but considering the backplane is designed for HDD drives that max out at 6 Gbps, even with an 8-wide RAIDZ2 plus a 2-wide BTRFS SSD pair for read cache I don’t find it all that limiting even over 2.5 GbE.
Make sure you use a short USB cable (it comes with both C-to-C and C-to-A cables) to avoid speed loss over longer runs, and that the upstream USB port can handle 10 Gbps. I’ve had other issues with Scale 24.04 and 24.10, but using a USB enclosure is absolutely not one of them.
Here’s a link to the Sabrent 10-bay enclosure on Amazon. You may find better deals elsewhere or on Black Friday, or bigger or faster enclosures, but it’s a good brand and has been very stable for me even with an inexpensive mini-PC to run it. YMMV.
Just an update on my own build. This enclosure continues to work very reliably for me, but only so long as I don’t employ any of the host computer’s power-saving features, Features that spin down drives or put USB and Ethernet links into low power states can offline the drives from a TrueNAS perspective, so don’t do that!
On the other hand, all of my other DAS systems have no power saving features whatsoever, so I don’t consider this a real problem. I just thought I’d point it out to anyone who was thinking of trying to save a few nickels in power consumption. If you specifically need that, UnRAID supports spindown and spinup groups for SATA controllers even over USB, but I’m not sure that it supports PCIe, NVMe, or Ethernet power states. I could never get unRAID working properly anyway, which is why I went with TrueNAS. I’m mentioning it only to say that such things can be supported but aren’t the use case for which TrueNAS was designed.
You don’t have to overclock anything. Just don’t chase “low power modes.”
I second this, I have one of these enclosures and it works perfectly! … however there a bunch of similar JBODs that do NOT support Linux, so common sense would be to make sure you’re getting one with enough bandwidth (like the DS-UCTB), and has solid Linux support… some JBOD’s show up in Linux but have flakey support (disconnects, etc), and some don’t show up at all… However this one does, and it works like a gem! I do wish it had 20gbps connection instead of 10gbps, I do max out the connection from time to time with 10 SATA drives… Think about it, a SATA drive can easily utilize 250 megaByte/s+ (some go above 300 now-a-days) and 10 drives would indicate requiring 20gbps connection (with 250 megaByte/s drives), however, even with this restriction, I am able to max out the transfer to my SMB Share on 2.5G ethernet.
The linux driver is the same for 3 possible chipsets, however, the chipset used in the DS-UCTB is most certainly the ASM1153E.
If anyone has any questions on the usage of this JBOD or would like me to provide the output from some diagnostic commands (zbd, procfs, etc) LMK and I’d be happy to share.
To answer the frequent question of “Why use one of these when there are more common certified and known-to-be-working solutions?” it’s simple for me… there’s nothing else in this footprint and price range that isn’t a server chassis… and if you’re willing to sacrifice the limit of connecting 10 drives using 10gbps, I think it’s okay to do so if you know that going in. Plenty of people were connecting “Enterprise” SAS2 array’s using even more drives which were limited to 6gbps not too long ago, so this really is pretty decent bang for the buck in this form factor… There ARE TB3 solutions out there in similar form factor but you need to be willing to pay that TB3 premium… it’ll be nice when thunderbolt enclosures come down in price, someday… :sigh:
