SOLVED a stripe data vdev is highly discouraged and will result in lost data

[duder1982]

Hello,

A little background as it may explain why I am having troubles. I do not work with computers daily or as a trade, just as a hobby. I've always been a do-it-yourself kind of guy, but once I am over my head, i am willing to hire a professional. I've always been into home theater/media and why I decided I needed a NAS for a media server.

Back in 2017 I stumbled upon FreeNAS and set out to build a media server. I collected most of the gear in my signature minus the 8 gbs of ram and 140 gb SSD, which have recently been added. In 2017 I managed to assemble and program the server with FreeNAS and create files that I was able to access from other computers and store media. I had troubles creating Jails to get Plex up and running, so the system sat unused until now. Just yesterday I added the 4 extra sticks of ram to give me 8, I thought it would get me to 12 gb, but that's another issue to figure out. I had also added the SSD and upgraded to TrueNAS.

I'm not sure how I crated the files, not sure if I was supposed to create a pool or if I did create a pool and not just the correct way. If anyone has any good reading or videos on what pools are and how they should be created when building a server, id greatly appreciate any recommendations. Once finished upgrading to TrueNAS, I went to the pool menu where I had no Pools. I tried to create a new pool by example below, but when I do is when I received A stripe data vdev is highly discouraged and will result in data loss if it fails. First off is this the only method, and if so, what happens if I procced? Should I attempt to "import from existing Pool? I don't know/understand what a "stripe data vdev" is and why this drive or these files are this way. Is there a way to correct it? I just want a simple media server, so nothing extreme as of now. I would like to start adding more hard drives to have back up, does this stripe data need to be striped for this?

Thanks for any help.

I did perform a quick search in the forum but found nothing specific to my situation.

 

[jgreco]

It's just telling you that if your hard drive fails, your data is gone.

Your situation is a degenerate case of when people take two drives and stripe them together, rather than mirroring. Data stored without redundancy will be lost; the usual case is where someone with (for example) two 2TB drives desperately wants all 4TB of storage. Striping the disks together gives them the 4TB, but it also means that all 4TB is lost if either component hard drive fails.

If you mirror the two 2TB drives together, you only get 2TB of storage, but either drive can fail and there is no data loss.

The warning is arguably misleading or unclear for the single-drive case you have.

 

[duder1982]

jgreco, I wish I had seen your response earlier, for some reason I kept checking another thread section instead of this one. But after reading 100s of other threads with this error, it came to me that I was receiving this as I only have the one drive, as you had mentioned.

Can I run create the pool with the one drive for now as "striped" (not sure it technically will be as there is only one), then when I add a second drive for redundancy, change the configuration?

 

[jgreco]

Yes, the case where there's only one drive is a degenerate case and I'm guessing never crossed the minds of the developers, who are, after all, writing this for commercial systems with many disks.

when I add a second drive for redundancy, change the configuration?

Yes, but the process is nonobvious.

Pool / Pool Status, in the list of drives, select the drive, and in the three-dots menu, "Extend". Adding another disk will cause it to transform into a mirror.

 

[duder1982]

Yes, the case where there's only one drive is a degenerate case and I'm guessing never crossed the minds of the developers, who are, after all, writing this for commercial systems with many disks.


Yes, but the process is nonobvious.

Pool / Pool Status, in the list of drives, select the drive, and in the three-dots menu, "Extend". Adding another disk will cause it to transform into a mirror.

Thanks for your help, now let's see how much further I get.