Hello all! I have been thinking about installing Scale on my Terra-Master NAS and I have a couple of questions after watching a video on it.
I do not have an onboard M.2 but I do have a USB3 M.2 enclosure, how well does this work? Any issues to expect? Decreased performance?
If I install TrueNAS on the USB M.2, TOS will still sit there and not be touched, right? Seems like I just have to config the BIOS to boot to USB? That sound right?
As far as the RAID, I currently have a 5 but I have been waiting for TOS5 to come out and blow the NAS up and use TRAID (which is similar to Synology SHR). Does TrueNAS have something similar? I see there is a raid calc for TrueNAS but it’s quite confusing. RAIDZ or dRAID would be it? What is the difference between them? I will continue to try and look it up, just looking for input from people have used TrueNAS for a bit.
Raid-Z is what you want to look at. Draid is for a LOT of disks.
Decreased performance could be YES depending on the USB connection speed. You should be prepared to recover the original TM os image if it does get ruined somehow. If you don’t have posts of TrueNAS working on that exact model, you are in uncharted territory
Be prepared to recover TM, how do you mean? If I install to a USB M.2, TOS should not be touched, right? Or are you saying if I TrueNAS sees the storage that TOS is on and deletes it?
If that happens can you install TOS back on or if it’s wiped, will it be impossible to put TOS back on?
That’s what you have to research. Restoring the TerraMaster image.
There is a chance it could be lost, either by TrueNAS or just user error. I don’t know how TerraMaster is storing the image. On a different model, it looks like a firmware image or something.
I’m just saying that there is a possibility of loss.
Yeah I was thinking that as well. I just tried to post in TM reddit to see if anyone knows but it was auto deleted likely due to the word TrueNAS. I’ll try and reword it to get past the auto mods LOL. Thanks!
Someone on Reddit said almost all terramaster use a USB on the inside for the bootstrap and I can just remove it. If I ever want to go back I can just put it back. Going to check tonight
How much RAM do you have on the TM F5-221. Base RAM is 2Gb. I see specs of max 10Gb. That is barely over the min required by TrueNAS and 16Gb is recommended min.
I have 10GB total. So over the min but not by much. I am not doing a TON on it mostly just serving files for Plex which runs on something else. Would like to put Unifi server on it and maybe RustDesk but that should not be huge with nothing else running.
At any rate, if it does not work well I can go back to TOS. I just took mine apart, I do have that USB drive inside. I should be able to take it out, boot to TrueNAS installer, install to USB M.2, and try it. If it does not work well, go back.
As @Stux says, I have a Terramaster F5-221 and so can speak from experience.
TOS will be installed on one of the drives in one of the slots. If you reuse your drives, TOS will be overwritten.
If you install TrueNAS it will almost certainly NOT support the TOS RAID setup - so you will have to reuse the disks to create a ZFS pool, and TOW will be gone.
There is also an internal USB port which comes pre-loaded with a small USB stick and used by Terramaster as a boot device which checks whether TOS is installed and if not sets up to allow you to discover and load TOS over the network. If you are going to run something other than TOS, you can remove this USB stick.
I built mine with a USB SSD from SKK (looks like a USB flash drive, but is a real SSD inside) and I bought a right-angle connector to allow me to install it into this internal USB port.
However, internal port became unreliable, possibly because USB3 is less reliable, so it is now plugged into one of the USB ports in the back.
It is reasonably reliable. I still get occasional hangs - possibly due to a USB disconnect, possibly triggered by a SMART Long Test. The USB → SATA bridge doesn’t support TRIM, so I had to turn ZFS autotrim off.
I installed TrueNAS with the hack to use only 16GB of the SSD and I use the rest as an SSD pool (no mirror - but I replicate it to HDD as a backup every day).
DRAID is not for small NAS systems like this. I have no idea what TRAID is, but TrueNAS & ZFS are designed for arrays of identically sized disks. If your disks are a mixed bag, you will be better off sticking with TOS or using UnRaid.
RAIDZ1/2 is a lot like RAID5/6, but does redundancy at a block level rather than at a disk level. For space calculations you can still calculate useable space by counting drives though. (There is a good page on assessing your disk space on Uncle Fester’s BASIC TrueNAS Wiki.)
Your performance with 10GB will depend on what memory your apps use and your workload, but with my 10GB - 5.5GB used for TrueNAS, 1.5GB-2GB for apps, leaving 2.5GB-3GB left for ARC - I still get 99%+ ARC hit ratio for accessing small shared files from PCs plus media streaming using Plex.
So I should be able to remove that stick to install TrueNAS and if I ever want to go back I can put the stick back in and install TOS? I am not so worried about the data, I have a backup of that. I am afraid I am going to brick the hardware is TrueNAS doesn’t workout and I cannot get TOS back.
Sounds like I should be able to just put that stick back in and install TOS again, though. Thanks Protopia!
Sounds like RAIDZ1 is similar to RAID5, I will likely just go with that. TRAID is TerraMasters proprietary RAID that is similar to SHR from Synology. Its WAY more flexible when it comes to different disk sizes but at the end of the day all 5 of my drives are the same size. Just thinking if I needed to expand, I could buy one drive here and there and expand it out. If you are curious you can look up Synology’s raid calc and use SHR and add different disk sizes.
I actually never got around to publishing it (because I switched to TrueNAS) but I did create a more up to date TOS internal stick. But as I said, I found that the internal port was unreliable for a USB SSD that is used whilst running and not just for boot (no idea of the cause) and switched to using a back panel USB port.
I run Plex, Unifi, Syncthing, DynamicDNS, rsyncd and a couple of others. Unifi uses 1.3GB-1.5GB though (I think it may have a memory leak), so bear that in mind.
Well that leak stinks. I am looking into all options right now. It seems you can run DSM on TerraMaster by putting Xpenology on a small stick and putting it that internal slot. Acts like the TM one but looks for DSM. You can then install DSM like you would on Synology hardware. I am running the DSM web demo, no Unifi or Rustdesk apps though. I COULD try Docker but I have never worked with it and I would have to learn it.
