TrueNAS Scale Setup on used Gigabyte EPYC MJ11-EC1 Board - Backup NAS
While waiting for Black Friday, in order to buy my 4 x 16TB SG IW-PRO disks for my Home (Primary) NAS.
I decided to "get the needed parts for a Backup NAS, using my old 4TB disks from the Home NAS.
I got the Mobo (x2) here:
I got the 2 x 32GB ECC Ram of ebay.
The Mobo seems picky chose Ram with care
Config Decisions:
I decided NOT to enable HyperThreading on the CPU for now.
I decided NOT to enable Secure boot.
I did the “Naughty stuff” and split up the NVME Boot disk into 64GB Boot , and 150GB system/Application pool.
Frontpanel - Layout "snipped from the MJ11-EC0 manual) - Worked
The Seasonic PSU is nice, nearly silent.
It came with a 8x12v CPU Plug - Ftting directly in the MJ11 Mobo 12v power adapter.
Beware the PSU is deep - For a Node304 chassis.
If you have a mobo with PCie slots, and want to use a long adapter (longer than the mini-itx board. You might run into trouble with the psu power cables & pluggable power connectors (no room for them).
When i come back from the summerhouse (xmas)
I’ll bring back the 4TB WD Purple, that is going to replace the 8TB Tosh-N300 in the 6x4TB RAIDZ2 Pool.
Since the NAS isn’t in “prod yet” i could just erase & redo the pool.
But I was thinking i could use this as a “disk replacement / resilvering” experience too.
Can anyone give me some hints to do that ?
Step :
1: Power off the NAS
2: Replace 8TB N300 with the 4TB WD Purple (CMR)
3: Power on the NAS
4: ???
I’d expect it to be “fast” …
I haven’t even made a dataset on the NAS yet …
If you have a spare SATA port and the disk to be replaced is not totally failed:
Power off.
Install the new drive.
Power on.
In TrueNAS GUI, replace the failing drive (Storage > Pool > Status).
When done, TrueNAS will automatically offline the old drive.
Power off and remove the drive.
This is mostly a learning excersize, on replace/resilver… I hope.
My RAIDZ2 pool right now consists of 5 x 4TB WD-Red (CMR), and in order to get it going for test i added a brand new Tosh N300 8TB as the 6’th drive (only 4TB is seen/used on the N300).
Because i knew i had a new WD Purple 4TB (CMR) in the summerhouse, i had already taken the decision to use that one instead of the 8TB N300, once i got there. So the pool is still empty/unused, I haven’t even made a single dataset on it yet. If i loose it, no harm is done.
Instead of destroying & recreate the pool, I thought i might get a “replace drive” learning experience, by removing the 8T and install the 4TB instead.
As it’s a RAIDZ2 , and i’m just replacing one drive. I suppose i can just swap the drives ?.
I wrote these steps in an above post … Hoping someone would help me out with step 4 and on …
Step :
1: Power off the NAS
2: Replace 8TB N300 with the 4TB WD Purple (CMR)
3: Power on the NAS
4: ???
So this would be step 4
In TrueNAS GUI, replace the failing drive (Storage > Pool > Status).
Edit:
What would be the reasoning for adding the disk to a spare SATA plug, if i have just one failed drive in a RAIDZ2 ?
If the old drive is failing but has not completely failed (i.e. it is still readable, but possibly unreliable), keeping it while resilvering maintains full redundancy.
I have successfully replaced the 8TB-Tosh with a 4TB-WD-Purple
That was a head-scrather (for a newbie) …
1:
I replaced the Tosh w. the WD-Purple , and the system booted with a : Pool degraded message , and a “found new disk”
2:
I tried to ad the disk to the Rust-Pool1 , but i failed miserably every time.
3:
Then i fumbled around , and found some menu under (I think)
Storage → Topology → Rust-Pool1 → Manage devices
There i could "Click on the “Offline Disk” , and chose : Replace
I then selected the “Newly discovered” 3.64TB disk (WD-Purple)
And then it briefly looked like this:
When i had the box open , i also replaced the “Stock EPYC Fan” with the one mentioned above.
Now all i have to do is :
1:
To switch the NAS IP address to “static”
2:
Review the Secutiry settings on BMC & Truenas
I’m quite sure there is a BMC update that fixes a nasty "ssh bug.
Unfortunately the solution was to disable the ssh adminuser access
3:
Maybe crossflash Bios with the M0 version.
Might not …
But besides the above : I now have a working backup NAS