Can I use a hard drive that is connected to my router and us it in TrueNas?

[angrybird4314]

I have a 1tb usb hard drive connected to my router and I was wondering if there was a way to use it with TrueNas without connecting it to my computer?

 

[sretalla]

There's a way to hack it for sure, but I don't want to help you to do that as it's a terrible idea.

TrueNAS works with directly attached disks and does its best work when it is SATA or SAS connected to them.

If you just want to share the files from your router, run SMB or NFS on it.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Why would you want to do this? This is not meant to be a polite way of saying that it's a really bad idea. But the use-case typically helps to give more specific advice.

 

[Constantin]

I bet that the right person might be able to present a externally-hosted disk as a local physical one to the FreeBSD OS with sufficient command-line magic and perhaps some new kernel/OS modules too.

But as others have pointed out, FreeNAS and TrueNAS benefit from direct connections to the hardware (ideally via PCIe, SAS, SATA and in limited circumstances external versions thereof). It’s simply a bad idea to put anything else in-between, as the added response time may lead the FreeNAS software to conclude that a drive has gone flakey, degrading the pool, etc.

IT-flashed quality used LSI-based HBAs cost practically nothing, ditto quality server cases. Just combine the two with a suitable server board and you have a rock solid foundation to add drives to.

 

[angrybird4314]

Thank you guys for responding so soon, I was thinking about doing it that way because my old laptop doesn't have any usb 3.0 ports, but I have tested it and it seems to be fast enough for my use.

 

[Constantin]

To have a good TrueNAS/FreeNAS experience, please do not use a laptop as a host other than for training purposes.

see the resources section and select a good server from the hardware recommendation list. You can be in business for less than $300 for the server hardware. Then add drives as needed.

 

[angrybird4314]

I don't need anything special, I'm just using it for plex mainly, and I didn't wanna use windows 7 anymore as I'm sure it uses more resources then something like TrueNAS/FreeNAS. Thank you though.

 

[danb35]

I didn't wanna use windows 7 anymore as I'm sure it uses more resources then something like TrueNAS/FreeNAS.

I seriously doubt this to be true.

 

[pschatz100]

If your main purpose is for running Plex, then using FreeNAS on your laptop is far from the best idea. Firstly, you are likely to have issues with networking - FreeBSD, the OS that FreeNAS is built on, does not usually have good support for the NIC's in most laptops. There will be other hardware-related and driver inconsistencies as well that may cause intermittent problems.

Maintaining ZFS pools over a USB connection is not going to be reliable. Sure, you can use external USB drives for backups - but not a good idea for your main data pools.

If Plex is your only application, then you will be best off staying with Windows 7. You can help things along by uninstalling all Windows applications that you do not need.

 

[Constantin]

Agreed. There are simpler solutions for PLEX than FreeNAS, if that is the sole use case.

If a new platform is a must, the OP is likely better off with a RPi 4 serving the content directly off a HDD and graduating to FreeNAS once they need more than 4 HDD worth of data. In the meantime, a Oyen Digital Mobius 5 can provide RAID 5, USB 3, etc. in a compact, easy-to-use DAS package with one disk worth of redundancy. Or go with Synology, etc.

For this use case, I'd prefer the RPi route because 50MB/s performance is possible and the Rpi can be repurposed if the OP upgrades to a "real" server later on. The Mobius 5 case has also served me really well for backups.

 

[pschatz100]

As an exercise, I once installed Ubuntu on an old Windows XP laptop, then installed Plex. It actually worked better than you might expect for serving media and pictures. For a old system with low memory, going the Linux route is not an impossible option.

However, for a reliable NAS with modern features, no way.

 

[Constantin]

However, for a reliable NAS with modern features, no way.

Agreed. In order to live up to its potential, FreeNAS needs more drives and ideally a server-grade motherboard and plenty of ECC RAM too. Laptops are clearly not in that picture.

 

[angrybird4314]

Thank you guys for helping me with this, but I think TrueNas will be just fine on my old laptop, as I am now also using nextcloud. And I really like how I can use Truenas without access to the laptop. I know its not the best way to use TrueNas/FreeNas but so far it seems to work pretty well as I don't need anything special, and it would be really easy to upgrade to a desktop computer for plex and nextcloud as I would already know how to use the software. And my old laptop has a core i5-2450m with 8gb of ram which seems to work just fine with Truenas.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Thank you guys for helping me with this, but I think TrueNas will be just fine on my old laptop, as I am now also using nextcloud. And I really like how I can use Truenas without access to the laptop. I know its not the best way to use TrueNas/FreeNas but so far it seems to work pretty well as I don't need anything special, and it would be really easy to upgrade to a desktop computer for plex and nextcloud as I would already know how to use the software. And my old laptop has a core i5-2450m with 8gb of ram which seems to work just fine with Truenas.

@angrybird4314, your setup doesn't have long-term prospects for success. If you can live with your setup possibly going belly-up in a couple of months, then by all means keep playing around as a learning opportunity. We've all started cheaply, but have been burned losing data when the cheap stuff died. We're trying to spare you that pain.