Q about boot drives on TrueNAS scale

TrueNAS General
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I have installed TrueNAS Scale 24.10.1 bare metal on my system (see signature) and am waiting for the 4th HDD to arrive in the mail, before I start using it in earnest and create the raidz2 pool that will be the main storage pool in my homelab.

At the moment I’m using a WD Red SA500 SATA m.2 SSD (500GB) in the m.2 (NVME) slot of my mainboard as a boot drive, but using that NVME slot seems kind of a waste, particularly since I have plenty of free 2.5"/3.5" SATA drive bays in my system. So eventually I might want switch to a 2.5" SATA drive as a boot drive. (My currently understanding is that boot drives aren’t heavily utilized, so SATA should be fine…)

My question is now, how complicated would it be to switch to a different boot drive in the future? Is it just a matter of installing TrueNAS on the new boot drive, booting it up and in the GUI uploading the previously saved configuration file? Or is it more involved and I should better go with the 2.5" boot drive right from the start?

As a future 2.5" SATA boot drive I was looking at a pair of Samsung 870 EVO SSDs (250GB or 500GB depending on the price at the time of order) and would run them as a mirror. Does that seem like a reasonable choice or should I avoid those? If the latter, I’d appreciate any recommendations as to what boot drive(s) to get.

Thanks so much in advance for any insight you can provide.

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It’s just that easy!

It looks like that board supports SATA DOM modules. I’d recommend looking into getting one for your boot device. Mine is a 32GB Supermicro module and is plenty.

Remember, TrueNAS doesn’t allow you to use the boot device for anything other than the OS (which is quite small) and running a pair of mirrored drives to host the OS is wasteful.

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Thanks, I’ll stick with my current setup then for the time being and will look into SATA DOMs, if I ever need to change that.

Thanks again, good to know that this isn’t really necessary.

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Just like to add the reason why this is wasteful. The boot drive can be easily reproducible. All you need to do in the event that it goes bad, is to reinstall it on a different drive and restore your config file. This whole process takes like 5 minutes (likely less).

That second part is what I want to stress, backup your config file every once in a while in the event you need to restore the boot drive.

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