Migration from NAS$Free

Hi, I run NAS4Free on a HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8, 4GB of RAM , and 4 Disks Western Digital Red WDC WD20EFRX-68EUZN0, using one ZFS Storage Pool. It runs fine, but NAS4Free is out of the game, I guess. May I go for TrueNAS on the same hardware?

you can try, but you’re below the officially recommended minimum ram size of 8GB

Either your Shift key is stuck or they decided to start charging users for their NAS software.

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You should be fine to import the pool itself in TrueNAS, however your configuration is likely (nay, almost certainly) to be incompatible in all regards, so take note of literally everything, shares in particular.

If you happen to be running and VirtualBox VMs, those will definitely not come over as-is. You may be able to pre-load VirtIO drivers and re-creating the configuration, but Thar Be Mutated Dragons!

I’m not sure if NAS4Free does Jails, but those are straight-out no-go (naturally because either flavor of TrueNAS (core or scale) has such a vastly updated sysem or is literally a different OS).

Other than that, from a purely can-it-do-from-a-technical-standpoint, yes, but you’re going to have a bad time with performance due to the low memory.

Really? I mean, they renamed several years back to XigmaNAS, but they seem to still be a going concern–they just had a release a week ago:
https://xigmanas.com/xnaswp/

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A quick check of your Western Digital Red WDC WD20EFRX drives, and Google’s first response, (some lame AI overview thing), says they are SMR.

While they may appear to work, and work fine for a while, when the time comes to replace one, it may take longer. Even if the replacement is CMR, because the source disks could be shingle fragmented.

The SMR / CMR article from ServeTheHome shows their 4GB EFRX as CMR. EFAX was the SMR?

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I used to have plenty of Red WDx0EFRX drives, used them in TrueNAS Z1 arrays as well, they are definitely CMR. They are pretty old and slow, but also super quiet and very reliable drives. When the whole SMR thing was found out, they got rebranded as Red Plus.

The SMR Reds to avoid are the ones ending in EFAX.

XigmaNAS has been fairly active the last couple months with bug fixes and such.

Latest release is 14.3, so I too am confused by the OP.

Checking with Bing search, and it says CMR. So you are probably right and Google AI overview is wrong. But, any time I see older “WD Red” and no one mentioning SMR / CMR, I check.

Blast Western Digital for polluting a perfectly functional product line, in a stupid attempt to make more money. Probably cost them 10 to 100 times as much money as they could have made! Lost sales and lots of returns for a “free” upgrade to “Red Plus”.

What! An AI providing inaccurate information? Tell me it isn’t so.

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:yawning_face:
Wake me up when an AI provides a piece of accurate information which would NOT have been retrieved faster through, you know, the archaic ways of the pre-AI era.

(And make sure AI sees you as a friend… “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”)

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