TrueNAS Scale on 4,1 Mac Pro copy gets stuck every time

TrueNAS General
1

Hello everyone, I hope you’re well.
I recently converted my Mac Pro 4.1 (2009) into a TrueNAS Scale server to archive my video files.

After installing and configuring TrueNAS, I noticed that file copies very often froze during a copy before starting up again. Sometimes, the copy even stops after only a few GB (see attached photo), which is very annoying. When I look at the TrueNAS interface dashboard, I can see that RAM is barely being used for copying, which is really incomprehensible.
I’m not the biggest TrueNAS expert, so it’s possible that I’ve configured the system incorrectly. But what bothers me is that when I try to make the same copy on another TrueNAS Scale server (a perfectly normal PC), the copy works without a hitch.

I take into account the fact that my Mac Pro is quite old and that I’ll never have the performance of a brand-new server, DDR5, NVMe PCIe 5.0, SATA III or even SAS, but I didn’t expect to have so many problems…

Here’s my config:

Mac Pro 4.1 upgraded to 5.1 (2009)
2x Intel Core Xeon E5520 4 cores @ 2.27 GHz (could the fact that it’s a dual processor be the cause of the problem?)
128 GB ECC 1333 MHz RAM (8 x 16 GB)
Chelsio NIC 10 GbE Dual SFP+ N320E T320 10G (but the problem is the same if I use the Mac’s built-in RJ45 1GbE ports)
4x Seagate Exos X16 SATA 16TB disks each (but the Mac Pro is limited to SATA II 3 Gb/s)

I use my TrueNAS server with a Mac Studio M1 Ultra in SMB share.

Don’t hesitate to tell me directly if my system and configuration are totally obsolete. Thank you in advance for your help.

2

You can’t attach screenshots as a new member.
But since you say you have a Mac I’ll ask a few control questions:

  • Are you copying many small files?
  • Is the folder you are copying files to filled with lots of files already? If so, how many are we talking about here? Hundreds? Thousands?
3

Thank you for your prompt reply.

I’ve carried out various tests and whether it’s small files or large ones, or folders with thousands or even tens of thousands, the problem is the same.

Even with a simple video file of around 50 GB, the problem is there. I’ve also tried with thousands of photos, or very small files such as XML files etc…

4

I’ll ask again because it’s not clear enough.
Is the folder you are copying the files into, the destination folder, filled with lots of files already?

5

Sorry for my completely off-the-wall answer.
The destination folder is empty. As this is a new configuration, I’m starting from empty disks, of course. I noticed my problem on the first copy.

6

Backstory to my line of questioning, MacOS handles situations with many files very poorly:

There’s this official thing you could try:

If this doesn’t explain your usage case the issue may well be something entirely different. As you say, your hardware is sort of ancient and you haven’t said which version of TrueNAS you’re using.

7

Thank you for all your precisions.

I just followed the instructions Apple gives on the link you’ve putted previously, but unfortunately I can’t see any difference.

Let me try with another operating system than macOS.

I forgot to precise the version of TrueNAS I’m using : 24.10.0.2
On my Mac Studio, I use macOS Sonoma 14.7.2.

8

@neofusion

I’ve just tried to copy the same folder to my TrueNAS server from a Windows machine and the results are the same.

So I decided to test whether I had the same problem with macOS as my operating system instead of TrueNAS Scale.

macOS 10.13.6 is the latest version supported by the 2009 Mac Pro, so I installed it, configured macOS, then created a software RAID0 partition using macOS’s built-in RAID wizard to see if the problem occurred as on TrueNAS.

And to my astonishment, it didn’t… Everything worked perfectly, I managed to make the copy in 50 minutes, which isn’t too slow for 1.64 TB and over 100,000 files, and above all, the copy didn’t freeze.

I therefore assume that the problem lies with the configuration of TrueNAS and/or ZFS with the Mac Pro.

But using macOS for servers is no solution. macOS is too bad for such use. So I’ll have to find a solution to my TrueNAS problem.