FreeNAS 0.7.2 Sabanda upgrade preperation

[Dave Mac]

Hi there,

I'm hoping the community can point me in the right direction with some advice here. I set up a FreeNAS server (0.7.2 Sabanda revision 5543) around 10+ years ago, a simple raid5 zpool with 3x2TB drives to give me 4TB of movie storage. 5 years ago it was shut down when I moved house and with much anxiety today I have finally fired it up again. To my relief it spun up like nothing had happened, wonderful, its humming along perfectly.
However a lot of time has passed and am aware that FreeNas has moved on somewhat so I 'think' I would like to be able to upgrade the server to something more up to date (some plugins look very useful)

Can anyone advise the route I should take? What precautions I can take? (baring in mind I dont have 4TB of spare backup space)

Is it possible / as simple as popping in a new bootable USB and import the old pool?

Any pointers would be much appreciated?

Best,
David

 

[Ericloewe]

Is it possible / as simple as popping in a new bootable USB and import the old pool?

If it is ZFS, yes, mostly. Keep in mind that FreeNAS 0.7 was a completely different product, so the devil is in the details. That said, it should be an easy process overall, assuming the hardware is compatible.

 

[Dave Mac]

Thanks Eric,
system is pretty simple IMO, intel based.

• i386-embedded on Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 4400 @ 2.00GHz
• 3x SATA300 Hitatchi HDs RAID5
• 1GB RAM

ZFS Config:
pool: BigTank
state: ONLINE
scrub none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
BigTank ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1 ONLINE 0 0 0
ad4 ONLINE 0 0 0
ad6 ONLINE 0 0 0
ad10 ONLINE 0 0 0

 

[Ericloewe]

That's not going to be adequate. The minimum requirement is 8 GB of RAM.

 

[Dave Mac]

That's not going to be adequate. The minimum requirement is 8 GB of RAM.

I'll see if the mobo can take that amount. As it was built from an old computer, it might be a dead end.

But thank you for coming back to me, good to know.

 

[pschatz100]

Whether or not your system will support 8Gb memory will depend upon the motherboard. In those days, the max memory was defined by the motherboard implementation. Some were limited to 4Gb, others to 8Gb. Also, some motherboards used DDR2 memory and others used DDR3. While you are looking, you might as well chase down all the specs.

 

[ChrisRJ]

As to the upgrade procedure: Since disk capacity has increased so much over the last couple of years, you probably know a few folks who have a few 1+ TB external USB drives lying around. It could be an alternative, if you really want to re-use the old disk drives, to move your data to such external drives temporarily and do a fresh install instead of an update.

If budget permits, though, I would seriously think about getting new drives.