Upgrade from FreeNAS? Or Start over?

TrueNAS General
1

Hey all. I’m pretty sure it’s been at least 10 years since I was on the FreeNAS forums and got a lot of advice about building out a computer to run the software, along with a lot of advice about how to configure everything. This system has worked flawlessly over the past decade.

My problem now is, I only have about 6TB of storage and I keep running out of space. I have pretty much forgotten everything about how I configured my NAS – it’s just been running fine this whole time. I was considering adding new hard drives to the system to expand my storage, and potentially upgrading to TrueNAS, but I’m afraid of the complexities I’ll run into and worry that I could risk losing my data.

I was thinking about just buying a Synology or UGREEN NAS so I can move everything over without worry. There are currently some good deals on UGREEN during Amazon Prime Days, however when reading up on this, I found that a large number of people opt to replace the OS with TrueNAS.

So now I’m back to square one. Just looking for some expert opinions here… is it easy enough to upgrade to TrueNAS and add additional storage or am I better off setting up a whole new NAS and copying my data over? Are there significant risks when upgrading or adding new drives?

2

Build a new NAS, probably with an updated OS. Put it on the network with the old NAS. Move files from old to new.

That’s what I’d do, unless it is my lab and then I might not care about the old files.

3

You will get better answers if you give detailed info on your current system, OS version and pool setups.

I think your case comes down to is ZFS worth it for the advantages and disavantages vs Synology or UGREEN.

Check if Synology is ‘drive locking’