Using External 5 Disk Bay with Truenas Core

TrueNAS General
1

Hi All !
I need gudiance and not sure if that works with my existing setup of truenas core. I am using Truenas core Version:TrueNAS-13.0-U6.4.
I have attched 3 external drives and all are mapped in pool and working fine, However I need to put these external SSD /HDD drives into 5 bay enclosure availbel on ebay or amazon.
Not sure if I put all those drives into enclosure/bay and connect to truenas system with USB will truenas will pickup everything or not ?
There will be no chnages to drives except oving them from external individual enclosures to one consolidated hub or bay .

Kindly guide thanks

2

This can open up problems in the near or far future.

A USB bay can cause a collision of serial numbers.

A USB bay will have to handle ZFS’s I/O for multiple drives in a vdev… over a single USB port and connection.

A USB bay is a single point of failure, and is not meant to be used with ZFS, anyways. Its market is for casual users that just want convenience. They’re not built for 24/7 usage and resiliency.

Is this just to test with or will you be putting valuable and irreplaceable data on it?

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Hi thanks for replying yeha its my perosnal data and some VM’s I am running on proxmox like wazuh server , opnsnese and other VM;s nothing critical though . Not in production enviroment.

4

I wouldn’t do it. Its a good way of losing data. USB is not designed for this and ZFS will stress it.

The correct way is with an External LSI SAS Card and a SAS external enclosure of some kind.

I built my own out of an old PC Case, (smallish) PSU (and dummy plug as there is no motherboard), adaptec SAS expander, and an external SAS card in the NAS itself.

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Suggestion:

  1. LSI 9207-8E SAS9207-8E SAS HBA 6Gbps PCI-E 3.0 IT Mode for ZFS FreeNAS unRAID US | eBay
    There are two SFF-8088 connectors, each for 4 drives.
  2. Best quality! Mini SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 Mini SAS to SAS Cable 1M External 3.3FT | eBay
    SFF-8088 to SF-8088 cacle
  3. 6Gb/s SFF-8087 to 2 Port External HD SFF-8088 PCI Mini SAS Card Female Adapter | eBay
    for the enclosure which converts external SFF-8088 to internal SFF-8087
  4. Mini SAS to 4-SATA SFF-8087 Multi-Lane Forward Breakout Internal Cable 50CM | eBay
    SFF-8087 to 4*SATA Breakout cable.

Maybe it’s easier to get a bigger case.

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6

Thanks a lot . Can you please explain more about this as you installed External LSI SAS into main truenas PC or trnasfer all to external SAS case. If you can provide more details that will help me out. Thanks

7

As per @fchk 's post - its the same concept except that his solution is limited to 8 drives where I had 12 drive slots - so I needed a slightly larger solution

I used a LSI 93xx-8e (xx cos I can’t remember the specific model) which presents as two external cable sockets

In the external case:
I used an adaptec SAS expander - I taped over the PCIe plug parts and delivered power via a molex connector
A PSU with a module attached so that it would power on without the presence of a motherboard
Some SAS cables to attach the drive bays to the SAS expander
I then used a 4 bay SATA 2.5" enclosure and and 2 * 4 bay SAS 3.5" enclosures for the drive bays and wired it up with 2 external SAS cables between the LSI card and the adaptec expander (I only actually need 1)

It just works. The only problem was some iffy SAS cables internally to the case - but those were easy to replace.

I could have used SATA 3.5" 4 bay enclosures - but I had the SAS ones

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