I’ve recently been looking at options to upgrade (completely replace) my current NAS, as it’s currently more than a little bit jank and frankly kinda garbage. I have a few questions about that and about migrating my current TrueNAS scale installation or at least it’s settings over.
Q1: Does the physical order of the drives matter? I.E. The order they are plugged into the SATA ports.
Q2: Since I have TrueNAS scale installed on a USB flash drive (yeah, ik you’re not supposed to but it is what it is), how bad of an idea would it be to just… unplug it from my current NAS and plug it into the new one?
Q3: If all else fails, how reliable is TrueNAS scale’s importing of ZFS Pools and are there any gotchas with it?
Q4: Would moving to a virtualized solution like proxmox and installing TrueNAS scale on top of that in a VM make more sense on a beefier server?
E: Thank you all for the replies, the migration went smoothly :)
I’ve never used TrueNAS, but my experience with ZFS is that it could care less what order the drives are detected by the operating system. You could always shut down the machine, swap two drives around, boot back up, and see if the pool comes back online. If it fails, shut it back down and put the drives in their original locations.
If you are moving your data to new (larger) drives, before anything else you should take the opportunity to play with the new drives and find the ZFS settings that work well. I think recordsize is autodetected these days, but maybe for your use things like dedup, atime, and relatime can be turned off, and do you need xattr? If you’re using 4096 block sizes did you partition the drives starting at sector 2048? Did you turn off compression if you don’t need it? Also consider your hardware, like if you have multiple connection ports, can you get a speed increase by spreading out the drives so you don’t saturate any particular channel?
Newer hardware by itself can make a huge difference too. My last upgrade took me from PCIe x4 to x16 slots, allowing me to upgrade to SAS3 cards, and overall went from around 70MB/s to 460MB/s transfer speeds with enough hardware to manage up to 40 drives. Turns out the new configuration also uses much less power, so a big win all around.
I am not gonna be changing my drives, just the server itself and just wanna make sure I don’t screw up my ZFS pools, as that does not sound fun. As for the hardware I’m looking at itself, it’s not new ( a used server) but it’s sure as hell better than what I have now I’m
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I’ve never used TrueNAS, but my experience with ZFS is that it could care less what order the drives are detected by the operating system. You could always shut down the machine, swap two drives around, boot back up, and see if the pool comes back online. If it fails, shut it back down and put the drives in their original locations.
If you are moving your data to new (larger) drives, before anything else you should take the opportunity to play with the new drives and find the ZFS settings that work well. I think recordsize is autodetected these days, but maybe for your use things like dedup, atime, and relatime can be turned off, and do you need xattr? If you’re using 4096 block sizes did you partition the drives starting at sector 2048? Did you turn off compression if you don’t need it? Also consider your hardware, like if you have multiple connection ports, can you get a speed increase by spreading out the drives so you don’t saturate any particular channel?
Newer hardware by itself can make a huge difference too. My last upgrade took me from PCIe x4 to x16 slots, allowing me to upgrade to SAS3 cards, and overall went from around 70MB/s to 460MB/s transfer speeds with enough hardware to manage up to 40 drives. Turns out the new configuration also uses much less power, so a big win all around.
I am not gonna be changing my drives, just the server itself and just wanna make sure I don’t screw up my ZFS pools, as that does not sound fun. As for the hardware I’m looking at itself, it’s not new ( a used server) but it’s sure as hell better than what I have now I’m
Nothing wrong with used servers, that’s the only thing I’ve ever run. Ebay has provided a ton of equipment to me.