I’m working in a studio that currently has 80TB of storage on an Asustor NAS (AS6508T), which is being used as a central storage mount for 12 people, both on-premises and off-premises. Unfortunately, this machine is struggling to keep up with the demand, and my plan is to migrate to a TrueNAS SCALE setup.
The problem is… we have 60TB of extremely precious footage that we cannot afford to lose. Additionally, we’re based in Brazil, and there’s no way my boss would approve purchasing 8x16TB HDDs – it would probably bankrupt the company.
Long story short, is there a way to migrate the RAID 6 pool (currently configured on the Asustor NAS) to TrueNAS SCALE without losing any data? I’d greatly appreciate any advice or guidance on how to safely transfer the HDDs to a new TrueNAS system while keeping everything intact.
Longer answer: TrueNAS SCALE, (and Core), use ZFS for the data redundancy. And while ZFS has something similar to RAID-6 called RAID-Z2, it is totally incompatible with RAID-6.
Further, TrueNAS SCALE & ZFS have a learning curve, which can be annoying to new users. This is especially true when dealing with precious data.
What is the storage configuration of the ASUS and in what way is it struggling to keep up with demand? Space, speed.
Also what is your network speed and configuration? All hard wired, all 10Gb ethernet?
At the most helicopter level, if this is the case i.e. that your boss cannot afford to buy the IT necessary for a “studio”, then IMO they need to rethink their business model.
However here are my guesses of the generic requirements for a “studio” and how you might meet them economically…
Your data will consist of active data - video files that you are using to create edit current studio output - and these require fast access for both reads and writes, depending on your workflow. This will be a significant size of data but still relatively small compared to the historical video files, and the storage needs to be highly available and highly performant even more than needing to be safe for long term storage.
Historical video footage - video files that need to be kept as a resource for the future, and which (presumably) need to be kept online. These will be far bigger in total than the active data, but need to be on storage which is safe from data loss even if more than one drive fails at the same time.
I am unclear at the moment what age the Asus box and its disks are, what exactly it is struggling to do, how reliable it is and how close to end of life this system is etc., but I am guessing that you are running out of space and that it is struggling to keep pace with the IOs of a growing team loading and saving active video files on it.
I do not have any knowledge of the ASUSTOR operating system and its capabilities for growing or shrinking the storage without moving data elsewhere. So I am assuming that the storage is fixed for the present.
If this is the case, and if your ASUS box is still reliable, then if I was in your position then my starting ideas would be to implement a 2nd NAS box running TrueNAS Scale focussing first on supporting the growing IO workload of active data (using mirrored SSD or NVMe drives), and later adding more RAIDZ2 HDD storage to hold a growing collection of inactive data, eventually migrating the data off the ASUS box because it is reaching end of life and likely to become unreliable. This box might then be suitable as a long-term solution, replacing components as they become unreliable or fail.
