Hello everyone.
I am migrating to a new motherboard, CPU and RAM combo soon and I need some advice and/or tips on how to do everything properly.
Here’s some info on my current system:
Current NAS
Motherboard: JINGSHA DUAL CPU X79
CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon E5 2650 V2
RAM: 2 x 32GB 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC
Network: 2 x 1000/100/10 Realtek NIC integrated in the motherboard
OS: TrueNAS Scale 24.04
OS Drive:
128GB NVMe Gen3 ~3000MB/s (not too sure on the speed tbh)
Main Storage Pool:
6 x 4TB SATA 3.5" 7200rpm Enterprise HDD – RAIDZ2
Apps Storage Pool:
4 x 256GB SATA 2.5" SSD – RAIDZ2
You can skip these parts unless you’re curious:
Why I'm migrating
About two weeks ago my TrueNAS machine randomly rebooted itself while I was watching a movie on jellyfin with a friend. This already happened about two months ago but it rebooted fine that time.
For context, my motherboard beeps when the power button is pressed, then it throws an error code every time it boots because it wants a GPU to be connected. This time, however, it beeped the on power-up but didn’t throw the error code, instead, the power-up beeps replayed. This was late at night and I didn’t want to be woken up by my motherboard screaming about the GPU it will never have. I was also afraid that this bootloop could affect my storage pools in some way so I just shut it down and disconnected it from power.
The second reason is that, as you can imagine, two 10+ year old xeon CPUs aren’t exactly power efficient. I have the trifecta of good living situations to mitigate this issue: solar panels + still living with my parents + having a dad who also uses the NAS and understands the benefits of data archival with a NAS solution. Still, I always wanted a smaller, quieter and more power efficient solution so that I could realistically use it when I eventually move out of the house and have to pay my own electric bill (probably without solar panels for a while, too)
New NAS
Motherboard: Gigabyte AORUS B550M
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G
RAM: 2 x 32GB 2666 MHz DDR4 Unbuffered ECC
Network: Mellanox ConnectX.3 2 x 10Gb SFP+
New Apps Pool:
1 x 1TB NVMe Gen4 7100MB/s Write / 6400MB/s Read
My main concern is correctly importing the pools on the new install. I was always confused on how this works since I noticed that an “Export pool” functions exists but the warning message says that it wipes all data. I certainly don’t want that and I read that simply disconnecting the pool from system A and connecting the pool to system B and importing the pool should work fine (I don’t have encryption on any of my pools or datasets at the moment)
I also don’t like that my current OS pool is a single NVMe drive, my idea was to use 2 of the 4 SSDs of my apps storage pool as my new OS pool, then migrate my apps storage pool to a new pool composed of a single 1TB NVMe drive to have way faster storage for my docker containers.
The current plan I came up for this operation is as follows:
- Backup apps pool 1 to main storage pool
- Remove the two drives from apps pool 1
- Install TrueNAS Scale for the new system on them
- Restore configuration
- Import main storage pool and apps pool 1
- Create new apps pool 2
- Copy all data from apps pool 1 (the now unhealthy pool) to apps pool 2
I am mostly concerned about step 1:
I mostly manage the volumes for my docker compose stacks as bind mounts inside a dataset of apps pool 1, but in some cases I just use compose volumes for convenience or because sometimes the original compose creator used volumes and when trying to use a bind mount I get file permission errors and just give up and use a compose volume. So I need to be sure that all of docker’s data and volumes are backed up to the main storage pool in some way.
Regarding this issue specifically, I kindly ask you for any articles or guides on the two main problems described:
- File permissions / User and group management for TrueNAS (I suck at this)
- Docker/App data pool full backup on slower medium (like my HDD pool)
Please let me know if there are any issues in my current plan of action and/or what you would do differently. I sincerely thank you for taking the time to read this and I very much look forward to reading all your comments on this issue.