Hey guys, new on the platform and on the operating system.
I am planning to swap my the motherboard in my system. But there is some concerns in my mind.
The most important, the drives, and the boot drive. Will I have problems with this one? Like it won’t boot, or won’t find the 2 drives that I am currently having.
I am planning to buy a one with more RAM slot, more sata slot for future upgrades.
Any tip or idea how to do this change without a data loss?
Thanks a lot for everyone, in advance.
The typical prodedure, if GRUB does not get in the way, is that you just swap the motherboard, boot, fix the network settings (which may require a trip to the console) and you’re done.
Thanks for the useful reply.
If am reading it correctly, GRUB is the bootloader?
Yes, the Linux bootloader. The FreeBSD bootloader, in my experience, is ever reliable whatever the permutation of drives; GRUB, on the other hand…
Okay, thanks. One more question, shold I upgrade RAM?
Planning to buy a motherboard with atleast 4 sata port, 1 m.2 port, 2 PCIe slot and 4 RAM slot.
Currently running Tailscale, and serving my company with storage from home, and some family members. Also running Plex, and Home Assistant as researching it, planning to do automations and integrations. There is qBittorrent, Flame, Joplin and Mealie. Having a bunch os SMB shares.
Is it required to upgrade my RAM, to higher capacity, maxbe 32 or 64 gb?
More RAM never hurts, but 16 GB should already be fine with only 8 TB (or 4 TB…) of storage.
How much RAM would the apps use?
Try to find a motherboard with many SATA ports before these go definitely out of fashion. The downward trend is already clear but a NAS needs these ports.
Now as I see, the app and services uses around 8 gig, rest of it is depends, sometimes it is full due to ZFS cache, but sometimes there is a 1-2 gig left.
One more question, sorry but could not find answers for my questions in the right way. So in the future, I am planning to add more storage. Now I have 2 identical drives in mirror.
Is it possible to expand this pool with the same, 2 drives, and have 8 tb of total storage, or is there another way to expand this pool, with less drive, but same, 8 tb storage?
Or is it easier to add another pool with 2 identical drives in it in mirror?
Thanks again!
Then 32 GB RAM should be comfortable for the future upgrade.
You can add new vdevs in a pool at any time, and drives in the new vdev need not match the existing drives. 2x4 + 2x4 is legal. 2x4 + 2x10 is legal.
What you cannot do is “transform” your mirror into a raidz parity array: The procedure here is “backup, destroy, recreate, and restore”.
Ahh, I see. Thanks for everything, you helped so much.
Have a nice day/night/afternoon.
Oh… glad see this one. Actually I am thinking the same plan but want to stretch. My current system has only 4 SATA so my boot drive is in USB (SATA SSD with USB disk closure). Thinking to swap to entirely different CPU and motherboard with 8 SATA and want to put boot drive back to internal SATA port. Any difficult anticipating?
I would expect CORE (that is, the FreeBSD bootloader) to handle it gracefully. With SCALE I would not be surprised if you end up at the prompt of a confused GRUB.
So save the configuration file before you try. If it fails, install anew and load the configuration.
Disclaimer: I hate GRUB. GRUB knows it and reciprocate.
Oh… thanks. Well… what is GRUB actually? 
I always heard install again will work but process will be like?:
Thanks in advance
The “GRand Unified Bootloader” is Linux’ bootloader. 
That’s the process. Connectors do not matter; ZFS tracks drives by UUID.
I never wondered about the root/admin password, and indeed reused the same. I suppose that a new password would be replaced by the old one when loading the config.
