I have a multi-USB port and I am not able to partition or mount the drives in TrueNAS. when I run smartctl --scan all drives show up listed however not able to mount the drives or use fdisk to partition all of the drives on the USB port. Any help will be greatly appreaciated. I have the latest community version of True NAS.
Do yourself a favor and don’t try to make usb docks work with truenas, they simply are a poor choice for use with truenas/zfs.
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Portable USB HDDs work fine for me on TrueNAS. I partitioned them on my desktop PC and formatted them with ext4, but I can pretty easily plug them into my TN box and mount them at the command line to /media and then run an rsync script on them.
So you use it as temporary backup storage with an entirely different filesystem using cli commands and not the truenas gui… so the exact same usecase op…
Yeah, I definitely don’t recommend using a USB HDD with ZFS at all. For just a portable backup drive, it works fine though.
I’m not sure the OP was asking about using ZFS though; he just asked about partitioning and mounting them, not specifically about formatting them with ZFS and using them as part of the NAS. Theoretically, it should even be possible to do this, even though it’s a bad idea: the UI asks me this in fact when I plug in a USB drive, but I ignore it.
TrueNAS only supports ZFS.
Not ext4, fat, ntfs or anything like it.
the disks not showing up properly is likely a result of non-unique serial numbers. many of these “USB JBOD” things just completely fabricate the disk name and serial. the TrueNAS webui expects unique serial numbers. the CLI and ZFS machinery however doesn’t care. (this is a TrueNAS bug that also affects things like (unintentional) dual-path and device hotplug slowness)
(ie you can make a pool internally and move it to an external thing and even though the serials are different and all now the same, it will be available to import and auto-import just fine)
I should also mention that most of these things use SATA Port multipliers internally, they can at least operate stable and reliably as they are using the same vendor for their bridge chip but combined read/write will suffer tremendously (no, FIS mode doesn’t help much here)
there are exceptions, the Sabrent 10-bay USB JBOD uses individual USB → SATA Bridge chips plus an internal USB hub… but still will not perform all that great especially since USB bandwidth numbers are varying flavors of lies and marketing (8b/10b or 128b modulation overhead, congested root ports, bad silicon, bad drivers, etc.)
besides that, I don’t think it’s wrong at all to use one of these as a backup target. it will be slow but that is usually acceptable for this use-case.
just make a pool connected internally, shut down, then move the disks to the external device. if you did it right, it should auto-import the disks still when booting up. it should also export/import from the GUI fine (though like I said, parts of the GUI may not show all disks, the pool’s devices page should be fine but the storage disks page won’t iirc)
don’t expect blazing speeds, and if you see checksum errors you should probably throw the hardware away as it’s probably defective.
as always, caveat emptor. not every cheaply made device is made correctly. And please share the model of your hardware for others to learn!
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Sorry, that’s completely wrong. It absolutely supports ext4. Try it for yourself: plug in an ext4-formatted HDD or thumb drive, mount it (“mount /dev/xyz /media”), then read from it. It works fine.
While I admit that my usage of “support” is doing a bit of work there, I stand by my statement. There’s no support for anything but ZFS in TrueNAS.
In the same way like there’s no support for you using APT.
You can do it, but there’s no support and bug reports will be closed because of it. If anything were to break or work in a way not optimal to your usage, now or in the future, iX will not help you fix that. There’s precedent for them removing things they didn’t support, including things related to other file systems.
As such, if you still choose to build something that uses an unsupported feature, be aware that it may break in the future without warning.
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In Core should still be possible to import a disk via GUI, in Scale this feature has been removed time ago due to file permissions problem with data loss (if i remember well).
IMHO why take so much risks when you can simply plug your drive into a PC and manage file sync via SMB or other… In both case you need a power on PC to perform those activity. Also free software like freefilesync make this really fast and easy
but you should absolutely not rely on it continuing to be there.
case and point, the md subsystem was in TrueNAS scale (this was used for mirrored swap). Later on TrueNAS stopped enabling swap by default in 24.04 due to a number of issues with the swappiness being set too high and ZFS interactions leading to low performance.
it wasn’t until 24.10 that md was removed, it wasn’t listed at all in the changes, you just had to be unlucky enough to have a reason to need swap or try to import an mdraid volume.
same with apt, it used to be plainly accessible via sudo, then it was made non-executable, then more binaries were made non executable, then the whole root filesystem was made read-only.
Well hopefully they won’t remove this. It’s really useful for being able to simply plug an ext4-formatted backup drive (whether USB or SATA) into the system and do an rsync backup. I know some people think a NAS should only be accessed over a network, but that’s stupid: a direct connection is far faster than a 1Gb network connection.
while I totally get ext4 is unsupported, I do hope this continues to be supported as well especially for people who migrate to TrueNAS. Had I known this, migrating 6TB of data would have been a lot less painful (not having to go over 1Gbit) and I would have no problem bidding ext4 goodbye once the process was done.
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