How to do single hard drive

[Ipadmasterman]

Hello,
How can I use a single hard drive with freeNAS? And what are the alternatives if I cant?

 

[BigDave]

Hello,
How can I use a single hard drive with freeNAS? And what are the alternatives if I cant?

Sure you can use a single drive with FreeNAS, people do this every day. For most people, the use
of a single drive with FreeNAS is a mistake, with a single drive there is no redundancy. If you have
no copy other than what you have stored in the drive, and the drive fails, your data is gone.
The idea with FreeNAS is to use more than one drive simply because that's why it was created.
This website is your number one source for learning how to use FreeNAS, you are welcome here.
Our resources section has much to share about how to put together hardware that will run this
free open source software, as well as how to install the OS and how to set up your drives and
keep your precious data safe. The current Stable version of FreeNAS is 11.0-U1
We also have an excellent Users Guide that is updated frequently, find the link at the top of this page.

 

[DrKK]

May I ask *why* you want to use just a single hard drive with FreeNAS? Understanding what you're after will help us assist you, or offer other alternatives that may be more suitable, sir.

 

[danb35]

How can I use a single hard drive with freeNAS?

Just create your pool with one drive. It works the same as creating a pool with multiple drives, with the obvious difference that you won't have any redundancy--when your drive fails, your data will be gone. We don't generally recommend it, as we assume that you care about your data, but it's certainly possible.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Using a single drive will still give you the checksums, snapshots and all the other wonderful zfs features.

You could always add another drive later and make a mirror.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Juri.burg]

I think o using freenas with just one drive (On a vm).
So i have a simple system for plex, ...

 

[diedrichg]

I think o using freenas with just one drive (On a vm).
So i have a simple system for plex, ...

If that drive dies (only drive in the vdev) then it will take the rest of your pool (other vdevs) with it.

 

[danb35]

What "other vdevs" would there be with only one disk in the system?

 

[Fredda]

I think o using freenas with just one drive (On a vm).
So i have a simple system for plex, ...

If you really want that setup just to have Plex, there are probably a lot of simpler ways to do that.

 

[garm]

Install a vanilla Ubuntu server and install plex, it’s gonna take a total as l of 5 minutes

 

[diedrichg]

What "other vdevs" would there be with only one disk in the system?

I was thinking too rationally, I was assuming there was a data pool of multiple disks and a single VM disk. I shouldn't assume so much. ;)

 

[Juri.burg]

If that drive dies (only drive in the vdev) then it will take the rest of your pool (other vdevs) with it.

The single drive is a virtual drive, it's not gona fail :)

 

[garm]

Do. Not. Use. Virtual. Drives. They. Will! Fail

 

[Juri.burg]

Do. Not. Use. Virtual. Drives. They. Will! Fail

Why???

 

[Juri.burg]

The single drive is a virtual drive, it's not gona fail :)

i think about a normal freenas system, 6x 10TB HDD. just nfs or iscsi for Hypervisor.
Run about 5 Win 19 SRV and one virtual freenas as SMB, FTP, .... Server. This vitual Freenas does not need multiple drives.

 

[Heracles]

Hey Juri,

Really, you should not do that. FreeNAS absolutely hates virtual drives. It must have direct physical access and control of every drive to ensure its own integrity. If you put some virtualization layers between FreeNAS and the drive, that virtualization layer will hide information from information and FreeNAS will think that some info are saved when they are not / that some info are here when they are over there. It will confuse FreeNAS and translate to a high risk of corruption.

Just never use virtual drives with FreeNAS. If your need is virtual drive, then the solution to run and access these drives is not FreeNAS. If your storage manager is FreeNAS, this one requires physical disks.

 

[whoo]

It seems to be impossible with last version.

Version:
TrueNAS-12.0-U3.1)

 

[danb35]

It seems to be impossible with last version.

Why on earth would you say that? Of course it's possible to create a single-disk pool in 12.0-U3.1. It'll warn you about it, but it'll create it.

 

[whoo]

Because default install format ada0 ...
Ada0 is not available to create a pool,

 

[Ericloewe]

Do you mean use the same disk for the OS and storage? That's not supported.