dear all,
I decided to wipe my Microserver Gen10 and reserve all the hardware to TrueNAS. At the present time my microserver is a PVE host and I passthrough the sata controller to TrueNAS, but I homelab a lot and I need to separate the environments: homelab must reside on a different hardware. So, I would like a baremetal TrueNAS.
I need a sanity check from you, TrueNAS wizards, on the boot drive.
microserver gen10 has
4x sata ports w/ 3.5 hdd slots
2x USB 3.0 front
4x USB 3.0 rear
1x USB 2.0 inside
1x PCIe slot inside where now I have NVMe SSD used by PVE as boot and VM drive.
I would like to reserve sata ports for data HDDs.
I would like to reserve the NVMe disk for a couple of VMs
Boot drive - my take:
this is a home server, so I think that keeping things simple is better. Thus, I think I’ll use a single boot drive with a USB adapter. I don’t like to have external disks attached to my servers but microserver is so… stupid.
Question is: can I setup a cronjob to save configuration periodically to a USB 2.0 flash drive inside the machine?
Or do you guys suggest moving on 2x mirrored boot drives anyway?
downtime is not a big deal…
Okay, 4 hard disks. What is your pool setup, two mirrored vdevs of two disks each, all four in Z1 or Z2? If the NVMe dies, what happens to your VMs stored there?
How are you currently backing up your TrueNAS data? Can you afford to lose the pools and can you restore the data from backups elsewhere?
As someone who uses a USB SATA in production and can give you a real-life insight…
You must use a USB SSD and not a flash drive. You can use a standard SATA SSD drive with an adapter, or more conveniently use an SKK USB SSD which looks like a flash drive but is a genuine SSD inside.
If downtime is not a big deal (and it isn’t for me either) you don’t need to mirror boot drive. If the drive fails, just reinstall TrueNAS on it and restore the backed up configuration file.
You don’t need another USB drive to back-up the configuration - implement @joeschmuck’s Multi- Report script and you will get a health report emailed to you once a week together with your configuration file.
A few caveats:
You may find that USB3 ports disconnect unexpectedly on a regular basis - and your TrueNAS hangs. Using a USB2 port can reduce the frequency that this happens substantially. (I have a niggle that the hang of my SKK drive may be triggered by a Long SMART test on the drive, but I have not got anything more than a hunch about this.)
The USB → SATA bridge (including the one inside SKK USB SSDs) may not implement the full SATA command set. In the case of SKK USB SSDs they do not support the SATA TRIM command, so cell the free cell pool is limited to the never used parts of the SSD and the over-provisioning - however since you are not doing bulk writes to the drive once TrueNAS has been installed, this shouldn’t be a problem.
If you put your VMs and Apps on an NVMe drive (good decision IMO), then you can do a quiet time replication to HDDs by way of a backup - it’s not quite as good as a mirror from a redundancy perspective, but it may be good enough for your downtime-not-a-big-deal use case.
That said, if you are already using a PCIe slot for an NVMe (presumably on some sort of adapter), then you could think about getting an adapter that supports e.g. 2x or 4x NVMe so you can have a mirror and room for growth. A quick bit of research says that the MB has 2x PCIe slots, one x4 lanes, one x8 lanes *which might support bifurcation into 2x 4 lanes. You need someone else (like @Stux or @etorix to advise on this and the best NVMe adapter.
