Converting old pc into TrueNAS server.

[censrd]

So my research into this eco system thus far has lead me to believe that my hopes of simply installing TrueNAS over my old windows system drive and enabling me to access my exisiting array of various hard drives wont work as easily as i had hoped. If i understand correctly I will need to backup the data on my existing drives before i can add them into a pool and "start fresh". I guess my main reason for posting this question is the posts that i gathered this info from were between 5-8 years old, so thought it might be worth asking in case some funtionality has changed since then. But as i type this and read through another forum post I'm now lead to beleive that i can add individual drives to my NAS with existing data... So now i'm not just confused but NOOB confused.

 

[styno]

simply installing TrueNAS over my old windows system drive and enabling me to access my exisiting array of various hard drives wont work as easily as i had hoped.

Exactly. The main reason being that TrueNAS is using the ZFS filesystem and your Windows install is not (most likely NTFS or ReFS)

 

[Yorick]

Check out the ars technica zfs article, that’s as good an introduction as you can find.

In a nutshell, for just file storage over gbit Ethernet you’ll likely run anything from a 3-wide raidz1 (little iffy with resilience though) to 8-wide raidz2, depending on number of drives you have. Each drive in a raidz vdev can have as much capacity as the smallest drive, which is why you typically see these made of same-size drives.

If that old desktop is using a Realtek NIC, you may want to consider adding an Intel i210 card or similar to have an easier time with networking under FreeBSD.

How many drives do you have, what capacity are they, and what is your use case for this NAS?

 

[censrd]

Exactly. The main reason being that TrueNAS is using the ZFS filesystem and your Windows install is not (most likely NTFS or ReFS)

So I've already been experimenting with open media vault, but couldn't for the life of me manage to successfully share more than 2 of my drives. so this trying out this method, so the ssd that had windows is already gone and replaced with truenas, but yes the other drives are all NTFS.

 

[censrd]

Check out the ars technica zfs article, that’s as good an introduction as you can find.

In a nutshell, for just file storage over gbit Ethernet you’ll likely run anything from a 3-wide raidz1 (little iffy with resilience though) to 8-wide raidz2, depending on number of drives you have. Each drive in a raidz vdev can have as much capacity as the smallest drive, which is why you typically see these made of same-size drives.

If that old desktop is using a Realtek NIC, you may want to consider adding an Intel i210 card or similar to have an easier time with networking under FreeBSD.

How many drives do you have, what capacity are they, and what is your use case for this NAS?

Thanks for the article suggestion, i'll check it out now.

In terms of the what, why and what i hope to achieve, initally its because I upgraded my pc and went from having between 8-10 drives locally installed. To just putting a couple m2 drives and a 6tb of local storage on my new pc, and leaving the older drives in their original case in another room.

Being that i do video production i've been backing up with a combination of backblaze and USB drives. But striving to have better management of all my working assests and various client media that is both redundant and obviously fast to access to work with. Clearly my current setup is subpar in terms of data safety. Then there is also entertainment media I would like to have access to from various devices in the house and if possibly from external locations would be good, but i would priortise data safety and security over that desire.

Thus my looking at NAS solutions, in a perfect world I would invest in a synology 10 bay but I can't afford that atm, plus being in lockdown I felt a bit of education in a area I'm not familiar with couldn't hurt.

My current collection consists of 3x4tb WD HDDs, 2x2tb WD HDDs, 2x1tb seagate HDD's, as well as a draw full of other old drives and USB backups.

My other issue is, they are all at or over 80% full so to be able to juggle that data so i can set up a pool as per TrueNAS presents another headache.

 

[Yorick]

That is a bit of a headache.

Fast access: Define "fast" :). Designing for GBit Ethernet is vastly different from designing for 10 GBit Ethernet. GBit even a single vdev can saturate, particularly with large files; 10 GBit you'll need several vdevs to get the IOPS and throughput to saturate that.

With disparate drive sizes, your best bet might be a pool with single redundancy and mirror vdevs: 2x1TB, 2x2TB, 2x4TB. That'll give you a total of 7TB of storage. You can use up to 80% of that before performance tanks utterly, and you may care about TiB more than TB: Around 5 TiB of usable storage. Whether that's even worth the effort is a good question.

You can save up for larger drives, and decide what you'll do. If you need to saturate 10Gbit, probably again mirrors, maybe 8TB or 12TB drives; if just GBit, then a raidz2 with 6x8 or 6x12 can make sense. If you don't mind "shucking", 8TB drives can be had for around USD 140 and 12TB drives for around USD 180.

RAM-wise you can start with 16GiB, and you may end up at 32GiB so you have more room to cache metadata.

Yet another idea is UnRAID. Pro: You can add drives one by one, have parity drives, and they can be different sizes. Con: You get the performance of a single drive, there is no checksumming, no snapshots. You'll never saturate 10 GBit, but if performance is secondary and convenience the most important thing, it can make sense.

 

[censrd]

Yet another idea is UnRAID

So after reading the ars technika write up, it has properly opened my eyes to the absoloute trip down into the rabbits den, that I was embarking upon without having a proper clue of what i was getting myself involved with.

This whole environment looks amazing for its intended purpose and maybe in a few years time I'll revisit this when my needs change. Safe to say this isn't the solution to my problem that i was thinking it was.

Just curious as to wether you would suggest going down the Unraid solution or if there are any other potential answers out there i should look into. As mentioned i had started with Openmediavault, but could only manage to get 2 of my drives appearing, but maybe reverting back to that vs $100 invested into Unraid...

Anyway I just wanted to say a massive thank you for your time and efforts in replying to my inital post. Your answers gave me more info than my previous 3-5 hours of research had managed. So much appreciated that you took the time to answer my question in such a detailed manner.

Cheers
Stephen

 

[Yorick]

I’ve heard good things about OMV as well, and haven’t used either solution myself. Maybe someone who’s used either can comment.