If this is a basic noob question apologies but after a little advice
So little bit of specs and background
I have 8 WD Red Plus drives all at 3TB each, running with zfs and two drive redundancy
Build Freenas 9.10.2-U6
CPU Intel Atom C2750 2.40Ghz
Ram 32GB ECC
Last night a bad sector error appears so I jumped online to order a new drive.
3TB seem to be be few and far between
Going direct to WD 3TB is £109.99 ($138.22)
Amazon on the other hand have 4TB for £98.99 ($124.40)
Back when I built the nas I read you were meant to have a gig or ram for every TB of storage space. If I get 4TB drive that would take me over that limit. Is it best to stick with the 3TB drive or will bad things happen if I go with the cheaper 4TB drive?
Thanks in advance for any help, and if it’s an embarrassingly noob question or completely the wrong place for me to be feel free to delete
Afaik, you can use larger drive without issue… but obviously with your layout you will have only the 3tb of 4.
Also, starting using larger drive, can be a strategy for future expanse purpose (you can split the disks purchase, but you will have the space usable when all disks has been replaced)
Oh that’s amazing news, I was guessing I’d have to build a whole new machine to get more storage.
The 3TB have been working for a while now. All bar 2 of the drives have been working flawlessly since 2015, although it’s not been powered on all that time.
So it might be time to slowly increase all the sizes on the drives
You might think about updating that as well to a current version, preferable Scale because it is in active development vs Core only getting safety updates and bugfixes.
Not sure what is he right way for this, maybe you have to jump from major release to major release and at some point make the jump from bsd to linux. At same point maybe backing up the config, installing Scale and then importing the pool also works .
Or just install the newest version of Scale a different boot drive to see if the hardware works and than try to import the pool. Geli encryption might cause problems here.
I’ve looked into upgrading before but I’ve been running Freenas off a Sandisk usb stick since 2015 when I built it, and read that Truenas is discouraged on a usb drive so never got round to doing as I don’t think there’s space for an internal ssd to boot from.
Will give it another go while updating the drives, it might help with some of the other issues I’ve been having
this kind of adapter
plus a small cheap ssd will do the job perfectly (32gb are enough).
From aliexpress or similar, probably max 10€ for both, and you will keep ur actual boot usb intact for every case.
With newer hardware, a pci-ex to NVME do the same job (a bit better), but on old pc the boot from NVME is not granted
Well, you can place an sata ssd almost anywhere in a case. If you have an unused ssd or don’t mind loosing warranty, you could open it up. Sometimes they are just the connector + a 2x6cm PC, so even smaller.
Oh if that will solve it will go for it or might grab an enclosure so there’s not a bare ssd sat on the floor, it will only run at usb 2.0 speeds but definitely worth doing
The one drawback might be power, USB 2.0 only supplies 0.5A, per specification. That said, many mainboards allow up to 1.A (or more). Not sure if that really cause trouble, but I tend to worry about these things…
One user here recommends SSK SSD sticks, as they are “real” ssds and not a usb stick.
There’s no warranty to worry about I purchased the parts in 2015 and put it together myself. The only issue putting it inside would be spare sata ports I think they are all used from the 8 drives. Might try using the enclosure idea to run it, worst case is I find a enclosure with power to help if I can’t find an ssd with low enough power
I explained that badly, I meant opening up the case of a newly bought ssd. That would void waranty for the ssd, but make it fit in a tight case. I did this once in order to put one in a Thin Client.
Intel says the Intel Atom® Prozessor C2750 SoC has 6 Sata ports, so the mainboard likely has an additional controller, as you wrote you have 8 disks.
So maybe the MB has more than two additional ports? Not unlikely that physically fitting 8 drives into the case were the limiting factor and not the number of sata ports.
Oh right, I could give it a go but it will probably be beyond my skill level.
I’ll have to open the case up to check if I put an extra controller in there for the hard drives. The mother board in there is an Asrock Rack one with the cpu soldered onto the board which might have had enough. I’ll dig out the model number and open it up when I get back in
Just dug out the info, yep that’s the one that’s in there and it’s still running like a champ. Didn’t realise there was that many sata ports on there. I’ll definitely be able to get a ssd in there too then
