QNAP TS-877 Truenas Journal

TrueNAS General
41

Few things why i like and want to move to truenas. The future is bright

And this is barely scratching the surface.

But one thing i will add, is when look at the truenas interface, it’s very concise in it’s design in the sense that it has little to no bloat at all. Everything serves a clear purpose and doesn’t steer into bloatware. Compare that to say QTS.

I’ve used QTS for years, i know how to navigate that maze. But when you switch to truenas, it’s like suddenly all that bloat is gone, it’s very refreshing :smiling_face_with_tear:

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42

ok seems like his issue was related to his qnap using a very old bios, so truenas didn’t like that. so his fix was to reflash the truenas iso, but this time in rufus, select the fix in rufus settings advance to add a fix for old bios support. after that it worked.

solved :saluting_face:

43

in terms of power consumption for my setup,

i don’t do automation for backup because i power off backup and air gap when not doing any backups manually. saves on power.

to save on power i also like Christian think 4 hard drives (not including the 2-4 ssds) would be ideal number of drives to have and configured in raid Z1 in truenas. If you need more space, just replace them for higher capacity drives rather than additional drives.

Reason being, more drives = more power consumption.

Hm a follow up video

This is another youtuber i follow, he is also power conscious when designing his homelab servers

that said my setup does not spin down drives since i run a homelab server so hard to keep things asleep.

sleep/spindown is great for saving power, but to get it setup right depends on your circumstance whether you can do it or not without triggering spin ups. if you are too often triggering spin ups, it may not be worth doing. you wear out the drives with the constant spin ups and downs. if your usage pattern is very infrequent access, and you aren’t self hosting a homelab server for apps, then it might be worth trying. myself i do 24/7 spinning for availability. it’s not particular power friendly, but i try where possible, this is just an example of one of those concessions depending the situation as required :sweat_smile:

if you want to go power savings, ssds are great for that. Capacity sizes have come a long way :exploding_head:

price wise 2tb is affordable for most. 4tb is still considered premium pricing last i check. But spinning rust drives still win in terms of price per gig.

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44

I’ve been so busy with this project that i have been missing out on my diablo 4 gaming. guess i’ll play some while waiting for the graphics card to arrive today :sweat_smile:

i did go through my checklist but nothing much else i can do at this point but wait.

I haven’t setup truenas in a while, so if someone had some tips how i should go about setting up the raidz1 (raid5 equivalent) on zfs for 4 drives, that would be helpful. If i were to do this myself, afraid i might choose a less than optimal setting :sweat_smile:

deduplication - disabled (i don’t have ecc ram, so i probably won’t be using this unfortunately)

other features of zfs, not really sure tbh, but i’d probably be using snapshots so need that enabled.

What is the truenas equivalent for encryption lock for shares? i don’t want to encrypt all the drives, just certain shares i can lock/unlock at any time. How do you set that up for truenas? :thinking:

45

Watch this video you linked

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46

not sure i understand this correctly.

he was explaining the snapshots, it only backups the changes in blockfiles only for the purpose of faster backups.

But, isn’t it not a full file backup? meaning like if your source nas died, how do you recover if the backup uses snapshots that didn’t make a full copy of the entire thing, just only pieces of what changed only?

Sorry not sure i understand this well. I do use snapshots on QTS, but never as a full backup replacement. I don’t regularly use it for that, so not too familiar :sweat_smile:

47

There is a full copy on the backup destination. Each replication copies a blast of data from one snapshot to the next.

No time is spent figuring out what files to send or what’s changed, so essentially a blast of data can be sent.

Depending on how long you keep snapshots for you can retrieve any file from any snapshot whenever you want.

You can also clone the snapshot into a new dataset.

Or rollback a dataset to a given snapshot

Snapshots are taken virtually instantly.

And a dataset can be encrypted, as demonstrated in that video.

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48

ill do an experiment to understand better. your explanation helps but i also learn better doing :}

anyway good news i got the graphics card on hand.

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so proceeding to install that then go bios then install truenas.

wish me luck

*update

hm the graphics slot plate couldnt fit. so i removed it and now it does. i can’t remember whether i had another alternate faceplate to replace it with. but doesnt matter since i wont be using it long term, its just to access the bios temporarily.

thkfully it doesn’t fall out of the pcie due to the weight, since for a gpu it’s rather small so less chance of that (i would still recommend having a proper fate plate attached to install it properly).

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49

lots of things to report. will add screenies at a later date.

these are my results

  1. graphics card works
  2. i can access the usb flash drive with the truenas installer iso by spamming F7 then selecting the usb flash drive to boot from
  3. later, to access bios, i spam F2
  4. in truenas installer i could see the hard drives and the m.2 sata ssds. So i initially tried to install truenas into the m.2 sata, it claimed it successfully installed but i couldn’t get it to work because it got stuck at EFI shell. I will go into more detail for this below later, but the gist is i couldn’t get this to work when installing onto these 2 m.2 sata ssd drives
  5. i successfully removed the dom from the boot list.
  6. i tested removing efi shell from boot order, but ended up adding it back.
  7. i had to resort to plugging my external usb enclosure with a M.2 NVME ssd kingston A2000 installed in it. I installed truenas into that, and that was what worked.
  8. you know truenas worked when you see the monitor connected to the nas begin to load the truenas stuff on screen. It completes when you see the truenas options listed to indicate it fully loaded. It will display the lan IP to access the web UI. At this point you want to switch back your monitor source to your desktop to then access the web ui from browser to proceed with the setup.
  9. during the truenas install setup it ask if you want UEFI or not for boot. I selected UEFI (this worked for the external usb m.2 NVME ssd enclosure)

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50

One thing to mention. after installing to the external usb m.2 ssd nvme, i rebooted (removed the truenas flash stick installer), then it loaded into the shell and got stuck. So i click exit i think. or so i waited, then it began to load truenas.

I haven’t checked yet, but i suspect i will have to go to bios one last time to see if the external usb is listed and if it is, i need to set that to the first thing to boot from in the boot order list.

51

after setting my password and login in, i saw the only notification listed was

WARNING

‘boot-pool’ is consuming USB devices ‘sdc’ which is not recommended.

but what choice do i have here? i don’t know why the m.2 sata could not boot truenas :sob:

i know usb flash sticks are not recommended. But the device i use is merely a usb enclosure with a m.2 nvme ssd in it. this should be fine shouldn’t it? It should wear out like a usb stick since it’s a ssd.

52

truenas detects the 2x m.2 sata ssds and the 4 x hdds. wiping them with a quick format using truenas.

53

as i suspected, the boot order does show the external usb. there are 2 entries for the external usb, but one says debian. so that is the one i put first, 2nd the external usb, and last the efi shell default. the dom i disabled.

yet despite setting to disable, it still showed up in truenas for disks listed.

So maybe i need to test setup the init script so it doesn’t load. but even if it still does, you can simply ignore it and not touch it at all.

now i am testing restart, shutdown, power on if it’s functional. if it works correctly, i can then shutdown and remove the graphics card (won’t be needing it at this point), then install the sfp+ pcie and pray that works :smiling_face_with_tear:

Ok the reboot/startup/shutdown worked, so moving on to testing sfp+ optics see if that works. Removed the graphics card.

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54

IT FRIGGIN WORKED :exploding_head: Look, 10g Fiber!


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You’ve got some explaining to do QNAP, like what the f :rofl: doesn’t work in QTS, but the same damn transceivers worked after replacing QTS for Truenas scale RC1 dragonfish.

I think i am using generic firmware on the 2 x SFP+ 10g fiber optic transceivers (10gtek brand).

scroll in this thread for the exact model i am using if you are wondering, since i did post it.~

Another curiosity, the SFP+ pcie is installed in the PCIe 3.0 X4 slot which 10gtek claimed wouldn’t work (so i tried it because i was curious if it would work or not), but it did :thinking: Is it because it’s now reduced speed since it’s not using the PCIe x8 slot?

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Guess i will do some transfer speed tests, if it doesn’t seem good i’ll put it in the proper slot according to 10gtek.

But if it works, i can keep the graphics card installed as is :thinking:

So the price list for these parts

1 x 10Gtek 10Gb PCI-E NIC Network Card, Single SFP+ Port, with Intel 82599EN Controller, PCI Express Ethernet LAN Adapter (seller said this is similar to either the “X520-10G-1S-X8 or X520-DA1” for compatibility)

2 x 10Gtek 10GBase-SR SFP+ 850nm 300m Multi-mode Fiber Transceiver Compatible with … (i think mine was generic firmware)

  1. 10Gtek Fiber Patch Cable-LC to LC OM3 10Gb/Gigabit Jumper Duplex 50/125 LSZH for SFP (2-3 meters is what i ordered)

note: i ordered all 3 of these parts from 10gtek. They costs way less than fs dot com.

$48.40 (shipping price already included)

to connect from TS-877 to switch.

So order the same part so x2 = $96.8

Compare that to ordering from the QNAP store, you do the math :wink:

*did a quick check saw a 10gbe qnap addon pcie (QXG-10G1T) for $152.99 on amazon

note: price doesn’t include the sfp+ 10g switch you will need to connect these parts together. Nor the price of the desktop pc or nas :sweat_smile:

for switches you may want to check patrick from STH out who covers these things

Probably can get cheaper if you opt for 2x dac cables rather than the 4x transceivers with fiber optic cable (i didn’t test if it would work but i don’t see why not)

55

for setting up truenas i used these youtubers videos for guidance

so if you are a newbie, don’t be afraid. there many guides on youtube to help. just follow along and ask questions when stuck :saluting_face:

56

for the 4x 4tb hdds i went with raidz1.

for people new to zfs, raidz1 is raid5 equivalent
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6u0pjj/raid5_vs_z1/

raidz2 = raid6

there a lot of options to select from which is a bit confusing.

it does have descriptions so i’m NOT totally clueless, but i’m wondering whether i am missing out not using them or not. example they have things like cache, arc, zfs log. I’m just not familiar with this, so i will just not set those up and hope i am not making a blunder missing out on these things :sweat_smile:

57

Not all BIOS/UEFI can boot off NVMe drives. It wouldn’t make sense for QNAP to include that functionality really

I wonder if it can boot from an m2
AHCI drive.

And is it a SATA DOM?

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58

Yeah. You can probably ignore it. The warning is actually to avoid USB thumb drives. They tend to be very slow, and don’t have proper wear leveling, which means they wear out the sectors which change… like the partition maps etc

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59

well it’s 2 x m.2 sata installed in a QNAP QWA addon card. So it’s connected to that pcie addon card :thinking:

60

Disable just removes it as a boot option. Doesn’t remove it from the system. If you want to keep it safe you should unplug it if you can.

As I understand it’s 5GB right? Which is really too small for TrueNAS, but I also hear about people replacing the DOM with 32GB models.

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