Can't add another drive "Duplicate serial numbers"

[Jayskie]

Heya!
Had a weird issue that I can't seem to find my way around, I'm a complete noob at all of this, so forgive me if it's something easy.

I've tried adding my HDD as a strip pool and I get this error:

*Text version*
[EINVAL] pool_create.topology: Disks have duplicate serial numbers: 'S649NX0RC00844F' (nvme0n1, nvme0n1).
remove_circle_outlineMore info...
Error: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/middlewared/job.py", line 423, in run await self.future File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/middlewared/job.py", line 459, in __run_body rv = await self.method(*([self] + args)) File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/middlewared/schema.py", line 1129, in nf res = await f(*args, **kwargs) File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/middlewared/schema.py", line 1261, in nf return await func(*args, **kwargs) File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/middlewared/plugins/pool.py", line 741, in do_create verrors.check() File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/middlewared/service_exception.py", line 62, in check raise self middlewared.service_exception.ValidationErrors: [EINVAL] pool_create.topology: Disks have duplicate serial numbers: 'S649NX0RC00844F' (nvme0n1, nvme0n1).

I've tried formatting the HDD and u. It sure why it's trying to join nvme0n1 because it's a HDD and not an Nvme.
I'm using TrueNAS Scale.

Hope I've provided enough information, TIA!

 

[jgreco]

Welcome to the forums.

Sorry to hear you're having trouble. Please consider following the Forum Rules, conveniently linked at the top of every page in red, which ask that you post a detailed hardware manifest of your system. This will help provide some context for community members to comment on your system. In particular, it would be interesting to know what kind of NVMe SSD these are. It may be a generic type where the manufacturer has not bothered to provide unique serial numbers. If so, this isn't supported and it won't work correctly.

 

[Jayskie]

Welcome to the forums.

Sorry to hear you're having trouble. Please consider following the Forum Rules, conveniently linked at the top of every page in red, which ask that you post a detailed hardware manifest of your system. This will help provide some context for community members to comment on your system. In particular, it would be interesting to know what kind of NVMe SSD these are. It may be a generic type where the manufacturer has not bothered to provide unique serial numbers. If so, this isn't supported and it won't work correctly.

Sorry about that, there doesn't seem to be any red on mobile other than when there's a notification.
Regarding the hardware, the nvme is a Samsung 980 and the HDD is a Seagate IronWolf NAS Edition.

In the video it goes through a bit where we partition the drive, so that there's a 32GiB for the boot and then the rest can be used as a pool.

 

[jgreco]

You're not supposed to be "partitioning the drive". Please stop trying. TrueNAS is an appliance and expects to be managing these devices. When you try to outclever the system, you are actually sabotaging the design, and then strange things happen. Wipe the drives and start from the beginning following the instructions (and only the instructions) in the user manual. If you still experience problems doing that, then that's something that should be looked into.

 

[Jayskie]

I'd argue that using the whole drive for a teeny tiny bit of data is a flawed design, but I'll re-do it. I just need to get a new drive that isn't a whole terabyte, haha.
Do you guys have a recommended drive list or anything? I've seen that you recommend WD Red, but, it'd eat all the storage on it ;)

Also, is there a way I can do it without a graphics card? Guessing a blind install is the only way unless I had a server board or one of those fancy Raspberry Pi recorders that look kinda neat!

The saga continues!

(Sidenote: It let me add the drive once I removed the NVME pool)

 

[jgreco]

I'd argue that using the whole drive for a teeny tiny bit of data is a flawed design,

This appliance is designed to run on TrueNAS hardware designed by iXsystems. They're graciously letting you use it on whatever hardware you choose. Calling it a flawed design because you didn't read the documentation and follow the recommendations doesn't make it a flawed design. It makes perfect sense for the target audience, which is commercial and enterprise customers with a shelf full of disks. I don't think it's unreasonable for you to be expected to follow the design recommendations in exchange for getting the NASware for free. But maybe that's just me.

Also, is there a way I can do it without a graphics card?

Yes, plug in a monitor and keyboard, works fine. No need for a graphics card. Not using recommended hardware? No VGA on your non-server board? You should be able to use serial console for installs. Or just install on a different PC and migrate the boot media.

 

[Jayskie]

This appliance is designed to run on TrueNAS hardware designed by iXsystems. They're graciously letting you use it on whatever hardware you choose. Calling it a flawed design because you didn't read the documentation and follow the recommendations doesn't make it a flawed design. It makes perfect sense for the target audience, which is commercial and enterprise customers with a shelf full of disks. I don't think it's unreasonable for you to be expected to follow the design recommendations in exchange for getting the NASware for free. But maybe that's just me.

I didn't say the whole thing is flawed or anything, I'm really enjoying TrueNAS and I've watched a lot about it. But I personally, in my opinion and I know many others have the same opinion, that having a boot drive be the WHOLE drive no matter its size is a little flawed. Having to waste 100GBs in a 120GB drive is a shame, really. I love the project and everything it's about, just that one particular bit of it is a massive shame. Do you know how many cat videos fit on 100GBs?

Not using recommended hardware?

Probably not, I haven't had a desktop Intel CPU in half a decade
I'll try the migration option, I didn't know if it was tied.


Thanks for your help, appreciate it :)

 

[jgreco]

But I personally, in my opinion and I know many others have the same opinion, that having a boot drive be the WHOLE drive no matter its size is a little flawed.

How do you replace the data part of the drive when it starts developing bad sectors? Having a drive participate in multiple pools is untenable from a number of angles. Why limit it to just two pools? What if someone else comes along with a reason for wanting a device to have partitions in three pools? Or ten pools? How is the automatic disk replacement workflow supposed to work? It's hard enough dealing with all the weirdness of disk drives when they're only a member of a single pool.

Small SSD's are cheap. You can find 60GB SSD's for about $20, 120's for $25.

This isn't the right NASware for you if you're not willing to commit resources. There's lots of other NASware that lets you run on 1GB of RAM and whatever disk strategy you want. TrueNAS is targeted towards high end users, and there are lots of systems with hundreds of drives attached. This is squarely aimed at those big systems. TrueNAS is never going to be the right answer for you if what you really want is a PogoPlug-like device.

 

[Jayskie]

How do you replace the data part of the drive when it starts developing bad sectors?

I really want to say duck tape because I don't know the answer.

Small SSD's are cheap. You can find 60GB SSD's for about $20, 120's for $25.

Yup, I'll be picking one up on my work break, reliability was my only concern.
Really looking forward to having it properly up and running, honestly :D

This isn't the right NASware for you if you're not willing to commit resources.

It's not committing resources if it's not being used though, that's wasting resources, but again, that's my ONLY "thing" with it. Other than that THING I really like this.

TrueNAS is never going to be the right answer for you if what you really want is a PogoPlug-like device.

I don't know what that is, but the whole reason I'm using TRUENESS is for the scalability. I might have two drives now, but I want to expand that out, I also have some servers in Germany, I've just never dealt with my own baremetal, in-home solution before so it's a bit of a learning curve and if there's one thing I like, it's learning curves (which is why I tried and failed at the partition thing with my 1TB nvme, haha)

 

[danb35]

Small SSD's are cheap. You can find 60GB SSD's for about $20, 120's for $25.

I think at least part of the objection is aesthetic, that it's just wasteful--and it is. My boot pool--with several boot environments--has just over 6 GB used. It's one thing to put only a few GB on a 16 GB USB stick; it's another to do that on a 100+-GB SSD. You're right that they're cheap, but it still seems wasteful. It doesn't bother me much; I come down on the side of "but they're cheap"--but I recognize that it seems kind of silly to dedicate such a large device to just a few GB of data. The change--whenever it happened--to allow you to put swap on the boot device recognizes this, and uses at least some of the space, but there's still a lot of "wasted" space there.

 

[artlessknave]

It's not committing resources if it's not being used though, that's wasting resources, but again, that's my ONLY "thing" with it. Other than that THING I really like this.

yes, it is. you are committing the extra resources (arguably neglible) of 100GB of extra rewrites on the SDD, because if the OS only needs 20GB, SSD's will last WAY Longer.

also, each upgrade and boot environment takes up space.having more space (aka resources) means you can have more versions to restore to if something goes wrong.

you are also committing more resources to the system to make the topology of your drives simpler; simpler drive layouts makes it easier for the appliance to handle tasks for you (predictability) and also easier if something goes wrong and you have to rescue it.

recommendations are recommended for a reason, but, short of that, taking an appliance and then trying to hack it is often going to bite you back. there was another user who tried to do the "paritition the boot drive" thing and also had the exact same error. I greatly suspect it is from trying to break from the design.

 

[danb35]

also, each upgrade and boot environment takes up space.having more space (aka resources) means you can have more versions to restore to if something goes wrong.

True, but my boot pool with 17 boot environments (until I pruned them this morning) only took about 16 GB. As I said above, I come down on the side of "they're cheap enough that I don't really care", but it's hard to deny that putting the boot pool on a 120 GB SSD is kind of wasteful.

 

[Jayskie]

yes, it is. you are committing the extra resources (arguably neglible) of 100GB of extra rewrites on the SDD, because if the OS only needs 20GB, SSD's will last WAY Longer.

also, each upgrade and boot environment takes up space.having more space (aka resources) means you can have more versions to restore to if something goes wrong.

you are also committing more resources to the system to make the topology of your drives simpler; simpler drive layouts makes it easier for the appliance to handle tasks for you (predictability) and also easier if something goes wrong and you have to rescue it.

recommendations are recommended for a reason, but, short of that, taking an appliance and then trying to hack it is often going to bite you back. there was another user who tried to do the "paritition the boot drive" thing and also had the exact same error. I greatly suspect it is from trying to break from the design.

It's all well and good having space for rollbacks, but those rollbacks are useless if the drive fails.
It'd be cool if you could partition half of it for boot, half for storage and then raid it.

Again, just my opinion that having a 120GB drive for a, what? 6GB install is a little excessive. Not to mention the fact that even if you were to back up the entire thing, you could do it around 20 times.... 20 backups of a boot drive seems a little excessive, especially considering it'd be stored on the same drive, so even if the drive did die then there goes your 20 backups unless you've backed them up somewhere else, in which case... You're back to it essentially being wasted space lol (in my opinion)

 

[Jayskie]

True, but my boot pool with 17 boot environments (until I pruned them this morning) only took about 16 GB. As I said above, I come down on the side of "they're cheap enough that I don't really care", but it's hard to deny that putting the boot pool on a 120 GB SSD is kind of wasteful.

Do you have your boot pool on a USB stick? I'm curious and before someone mentions it I know it's not recommended, but I'm intrigued, haha!

 

[BoomShaka]

I can confirm that this problem is almost certainly related to splitting the boot disk. I wanted fast apps and i got problems instead...

 

[Jayskie]

I can confirm that this problem is almost certainly related to splitting the boot disk. I wanted fast apps and i got problems instead...

Yeah, this was me also...

 

[jgreco]

Again, just my opinion that having a 120GB drive for a, what? 6GB install is a little excessive.

Then propose a better design. But bear in mind that it has to be something that's realistic, and that makes things better. A typical TrueNAS install ends up taking about 20-30GB after a year or two, so basically we are talking about wasting 90GB. That's a drop in the bucket to your average TrueNAS system, which often run well north of 90 TERAbytes. How much design and development effort needs to be put into this? The cost in developer time would be so great, and the complications so significant, they might need to throw somebody at this for a man-month, just to mollify your desire not to waste a few GB. This does no one any good.

 

[danb35]

having a boot drive be the WHOLE drive no matter its size is a little flawed.

There are a few reasons for this. One is simply historical--m0n0wall booted from a USB stick that was normally read-only, loaded into a RAMdisk on boot, and operated from there. m0n0wall became FreeNAS, which worked in the same way. iXSystems bought the FreeNAS name and built a completely different product under it, but one that still operated in the same basic way. Throughout this time, the typical (and usually recommended) boot device was a USB stick. But with the release of FreeNAS 9.3 (in 2015, IIRC), the boot process was changed--rather than a static image that was read into a RAMdisk, it became a live ZFS pool. As a result, the boot device saw much more i/o, and as a result of that, USB sticks started failing rapidly. That's why the recommendation turned to a boot SSD rather than a USB stick.

Still no problem; at that time a 30 GB SSD was a pretty common thing and quite inexpensive. A bit more "wasted" space than on a 8-16 GB USB stick, but not too much (and the extra space can be used for wear leveling, extending the life of the device). But in the seven years since then, device sizes have grown, so now it's hard to find one under 100 GB, which tends to lead toward questions like yours.

The other reason (at least that I know of) is that Free/TrueNAS are built on the assumption of an unreliable boot device, and therefore built in such a way that failure of the boot device just doesn't matter that much--in particular, that failure won't result in any data loss, because data isn't stored on the boot device.

Many NAS OSs are designed in this way, so this is hardly unique to TrueNAS--a couple of other examples that I know of are XigmaNAS (which grew out of the old FreeNAS by way of NAS4Free), OpenMediaVault, RockStor, Napp-It, and of course the commercial ones like Synology and Q-NAP.

 

[danb35]

Do you have your boot pool on a USB stick?

No, I started using a SATA DOM about 9-10 years ago, and moved to a SATA SSD around the time 9.3 came out. The NAS I built for my parents has a USB SSD.

 

[danb35]

those rollbacks are useless if the drive fails.

Not the point. The point of the boot environments is that if an update introduces bugs that are unacceptable for you (and sadly this isn't unusual), it's trivial for you to boot into the last version of the last (or earlier, if desired) version you'd installed.