I have installed truenas on a minisforum um690 and attached a mediasonic (HFR7-SU31CH) with 4 - 4 TB hard drives. everytime i try to create a pool for the drives i keep getting an error
Error: topology
Disks have duplicate serial numbers: ‘1000000000000000’ (sda, sdb), ‘2000000000000000’ (sdc, sdd).
has anyome ran into thisbefore and able to help?
Basically, miniPCs are not suitable for ZFS: Not enough space for storage!
Multi-drive USB enclosures are not suitable at all.
Use a different NAS OS, different file file system (not ZFS!), or a different enclosure.
sorry if this is a stupid question I am new to this and trying to learn… so if i replace my DAS with a NAS enclosure instead would that work while still using a mini pc. also if that is the case would i also be able to do it if i decided to have truenas installed on a mini pc with proxmox?
Only if that mini PC has a free pcie slot for an hba card with external connectors.
so this sounds like I am out of luck? i have already spent a lot of money for this equipment which now seems useless . my wife will kill me if i spend more
You may get it working with a different os and a different filesystem, as etorix already mentioned.
Your hardware is just not suited for truenas and zfs.
could you recomend which os I should install and if not ZF, what i should use i am keeping family photos/videos and documents on this, so i would like some kind of redundancy if a drive fails (was trying raid 1)
i really appreciate you all helping and the kindness here
I’ve only ever used 2 nas os, one was xpenology and the other one is truenas. It’s pretty obvious where i stayed, so i can’t really recommend anything else… I did a quick google search and someone on r/homeserver said that he’s running openmediavault with snapraid with his usb setup, but as already said no personal experience.
Maybe it’s worth checking it out and do an extended test before putting any valuable data on it.
ok thank you so much for that i really appreciate the help
To get the terminology right: You are buiding a NAS; what your drives are is a “disk enclosure”, or “disk shelf”.
ZFS requires direct access to individual drives; whatever your USB enclosure is doing to present four drives with common fake serial numbers over a single USB link is not suitable.
ZFS wants a SATA enclosure, with four SATA lanes (one per drive), or, better, a SAS enclosure. And you’d need to put a SATA or SAS HBA (with suitable coolling) in the mini-PC.
For such a small number of drives, the best solution is a motherboard with at least four SATA ports and a regular case with at least four HDD bays. All inside.
ZFS being out of question with this hardware, your second best option is to try OpenMediaVault and RAID5 with mdadm. But I do not know whether this is reliable over a USB link.
Lesson: Research first. Ask ahead. Then buy.
It’s a bit strange sometimes, people buy a mini-PC (maybe due to space constraints ?) and then realize they also need to place an external drive enclosure next to it…
however…
I briefly looked up the HFR7-SU31CH. From what I understand, the device has a built-in RAID controller and supports hardware RAID 0/1 as well as a “single drive mode,” and it connects via USB.
I assume you’re trying to use the “single drive mode”, and yet TrueNAS still can’t see the real serial numbers.
(The other hardware RAID modes are a very bad idea when used with TrueNAS anyway…)
Even if you managed to pass the serial numbers through correctly, running pools/VDEVs over USB is generally not recommended. USB connections can easily drop or reset, etc.
And, maybe doing all of this possibly in a virtualized setup, with all the extra complications… that’s basically a recipe for endless headaches (and likely data loss).
found this older reddit post:
I didn’t even read the whole thing myself,.. I started feeling queasy after a short time just from seeing everything that can go wrong and everything you’d have to watch out for.
I don’t think it’s worth it.
In the end, you won’t get a NAS you can confidently trust your data to.
Especially when you consider how much of a no-brainer it is to just plug a few drives into even older, “normal” consumer Hardware …
