Hey everyone, I am in a new situation for me, and I am not sure how I should proceed. So my TrueNAS Scale system has the following storage setup:
128gb NVME - boot
128gb NVME - apps
12tb HDD (x6 in RAIDZ2) - storage
Yesterday, after replacing some case fans, my apps drive just completely died. I tested it in a few other PCs, the other slot on my NAS mobo, no dice. It did show up on one boot, so during that time, I tried to import the pool Apps from the drive, with a resulting I/O error. I ended up deleting the pool on TrueNAS itself. I ordered a replacement for this drive and it’s arriving today.
My question i, would restoring from a config backup (made hours before drive failure) restore the pool and app configurations to their original state? If so, when installing the new drive, should I create a new pool with that drive, and then import the config? Or should I simply install the new drive and let the config handle everything? I am fine ‘fixing’ my apps configurations if I need to, but I’d prefer to avoid all that. Thanks for the help, I hope my predicament makes sense!
You lost the apps pool along with all the data on that pool. Usual setup for apps is a mirror vdev pool so you have more than one drive that can fail. I think you will be setting up all your apps again.
The System Configuration backup is of use when replacing a boot-pool device.
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Got it, thank you. So I should essentially just set this drive and the Apps pool as brand new then?
Also, I do know that the mirrored VDEV is the usual setup, but I am out of SATA & M.2 slots on my mobo, and adding a PCIe card would remove the second M.2 slot anyway. I was confident that an SSD with minimal writes/reads would be okay, but of course I shot myself in the foot thinking that.
With a single drive apps pool, you should look into backing up the app pool to your main data pool, if you have the space. ZFS replication and the snapshots feature is what you would probably use.
Another choice may be a usb attached SSD for you boot pool. Not a usb thumb drive. That would free up the NVMe that you currently have your boot pool on. then you could set up an apps pool with the two NVMe in a Mirror VDEV.
Mirror VDEVs can have disks added and removed so we can convert your single drive NVMe apps pool to a Mirror VDEV at a later time if you want to work on changing the boot drive setup also.
Post back if you have questions. Yes, you are setting the Apps pool as brand new. You may want to give it a different name like APPS2 since I don’t know if anything on the system will point to the currently failed pool. It would be easier to track issues if the names are slighty different.
Got it. I ordered x2 128gb NVME drives, and an external USB adapter, to arrive today. My motherboard does have some internal USB ports. I plan to put 2 NVMEs in the M.2 slots (for mirrored Apps pool) and plug the current boot drive into an internal USB port via the external adapter. Do you see any problems with this solution?
Also, surely if I name the pool ‘apps’ again, everything will re-link to that pool? I do have many errors in TrueNAS relating to this pool currently, so it knows something is missing. Thank you for your help!
I don’t know if it will treat the old ‘apps’ pool and the new ‘apps’ pool as the same. I only suggested the name change to make it easier to see what any error messages would point to. ‘apps’ would be the old pool and ‘apps2’ would be new. If their named the same, I don’t know if there is a problem with with the new or something is still pointed to the old. I don’t know if ZFS has any unique identifier for the pools or if it is just the name.
You can test the boot drive in the usb adapter before you start moving everything around. You just have to change or fix the boot device in bios.
Make sure to get a new System Configuration as you go along. You can keep them in separate folders with names so you know which was for what exact set up of boot and pools. There valuable if we need to do a fresh install on the boot device, for some reason.
Great, thank you! I will post back here with further questions or updates.
Alright, I got my system booted up, all drives recognized and everything seems to be working great. The only issue I’ve encountered is this message I get every boot. I think it’s telling me that running my boot drive in the USB enclosure is bad? Should I be concerned about this? Enclosure has plenty of ventilation.
I think that is a normal warning about USB. It’s just a single ‘drive’ attached to USB?
It’s just a low-power 128gb Gen3 NVME in an aluminum enclosure.
More just checking you didn’t have something that had two or more drives in a mirror in an enclosure.
Do you have your two NVMe in a mirror pair for you apps pool now? Are you okay doing the Replace procedure for the failed one?
Yup, apps pool NVMEs are in the motherboard slots (mirrored). Boot NVME is in USB enclosure. I did end up creating the pool with the same ‘apps’ name it had previously, and had no issues (I did have to delete the previous share).
Anyway, I really appreciate the quick help with this, you guys made me a lot more confident given the crappiness of the situation!
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