Edit: corrected (a little) what was a wandering mess
I'm needing to do a major upgrade to a long-working system, and I'm having to re-learn and new-learn Free/True NAS to do it. I have spent several days researching this, so I have a lot of pieces, but no consistent path obvious to me yet. I've used FreeNAS since 0.7.
The objective: upgrade my long-running stable system to the latest release, which to my mind is to get to TrueNAS 12.
What prompted this is that I'm nearing 75% on the existing pool, and it's time to prevent issues from that. I bought a batch of new 8TB disks, and set about researching how to do the move. That research dragged in a batch of other items, including how to safely delete/dissolve the plex jail I don't use and recover its storage, as well as what to do and how to do it with the new disks.
Existing System c.v.:
FreeNAS 11.1 U7
pool flags not upgraded after upgrade to 11.1 from 9.10
Supermicro X9SCL-f
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 V2 @ 3.10GHz
12 GB ECC UDIMM
7x 3TB SATA drives in RAIDZ3
The original plan was to simply sub in one 8TB at a time for the old 3TBs and at the end have a larger pool with no fuss. I also have a plan to go upgrade to TrueNAS 12 to get current. About this time, the road to hell got paved with possibilities.
Turns out that DDR3 ECC UDIMM memory for my MB is now cheap, so enough memory to get to 32G is on the way. Also, I now have a reflashed IBM M1015 card to take over disk chores from the MB plus 2-SATA (yeah, I know, bad) adapter card that it's run without incident for 4 years solid. Also, to do burn in on the new drives, I gutted/re-used an old PC case to house the 8 new drives and run badblocks under an Ubuntu live USB for burn in.
But I wonder - is incremental a good approach? The alternative is to create a TrueNAS 12 boot disk for the hard drive burn in chassis and replicate the pool into the temporary new system, then physically move the new disks and boot media to the production system box. The re-used case/MB system has an Athlon 4 and MB that runs ECC memory and was in fact the basis for a very early FreeNAS system, albeit with only 4GB of RAM, so it ought to be able to run TrueNAS. All this seems logical enough to get into trouble.
In many ways, I'm a minor victim of Freenas doing exactly what it's supposed to. This has let me just leave it running and doing its thing for about five years with minimal attention to it, so not I have to relearn the body of knowledge. I have spent the last three days re-learning, but I'm left with some things I can't quite piece together. I'm grateful for any help and direction.
I'm needing to do a major upgrade to a long-working system, and I'm having to re-learn and new-learn Free/True NAS to do it. I have spent several days researching this, so I have a lot of pieces, but no consistent path obvious to me yet. I've used FreeNAS since 0.7.
The objective: upgrade my long-running stable system to the latest release, which to my mind is to get to TrueNAS 12.
What prompted this is that I'm nearing 75% on the existing pool, and it's time to prevent issues from that. I bought a batch of new 8TB disks, and set about researching how to do the move. That research dragged in a batch of other items, including how to safely delete/dissolve the plex jail I don't use and recover its storage, as well as what to do and how to do it with the new disks.
Existing System c.v.:
FreeNAS 11.1 U7
pool flags not upgraded after upgrade to 11.1 from 9.10
Supermicro X9SCL-f
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 V2 @ 3.10GHz
12 GB ECC UDIMM
7x 3TB SATA drives in RAIDZ3
The original plan was to simply sub in one 8TB at a time for the old 3TBs and at the end have a larger pool with no fuss. I also have a plan to go upgrade to TrueNAS 12 to get current. About this time, the road to hell got paved with possibilities.
Turns out that DDR3 ECC UDIMM memory for my MB is now cheap, so enough memory to get to 32G is on the way. Also, I now have a reflashed IBM M1015 card to take over disk chores from the MB plus 2-SATA (yeah, I know, bad) adapter card that it's run without incident for 4 years solid. Also, to do burn in on the new drives, I gutted/re-used an old PC case to house the 8 new drives and run badblocks under an Ubuntu live USB for burn in.But I wonder - is incremental a good approach? The alternative is to create a TrueNAS 12 boot disk for the hard drive burn in chassis and replicate the pool into the temporary new system, then physically move the new disks and boot media to the production system box. The re-used case/MB system has an Athlon 4 and MB that runs ECC memory and was in fact the basis for a very early FreeNAS system, albeit with only 4GB of RAM, so it ought to be able to run TrueNAS. All this seems logical enough to get into trouble.
In many ways, I'm a minor victim of Freenas doing exactly what it's supposed to. This has let me just leave it running and doing its thing for about five years with minimal attention to it, so not I have to relearn the body of knowledge. I have spent the last three days re-learning, but I'm left with some things I can't quite piece together. I'm grateful for any help and direction.
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