How to do single hard drive

[whoo]

Indeed, this is the default behavior on install.
Manual partition could helps.

 

[danb35]

Ada0 is not available to create a pool,

FreeNAS has never (ever) supported having the OS and data on the same device, but I don't think that's what this long-dead (until you revived it for some reason) thread was about.

 

[danb35]

Indeed, this is the default behavior on install.

No, this is the only possible behavior. FreeNAS requires the boot device to be separate from data, and it always has. If that's unacceptable to you, you'll need to find a different NAS OS.

 

[davidzvi]

I'm not sure about the OP. But I'm looking to set up a one disk system (+ the OS disk). My reasoning is pretty simple, I want to see how the system handles my media sharing needs.

 

[Heracles]

Hi,

There is nothing wrong to do testing with a single drive like you just said you wish to do. Just be aware that such a single drive pool is not recommended and when you will be ready for the real thing, you wll have to design and build a better system that will satisfy TrueNAS' requirements and best practices.

 

[danb35]

I'm really not sure what OP's question was four years ago, but I think your situation has already been addressed in this thread--yes, it's entirely possible to create a single-disk pool, assuming (as you say it would be) the OS is on another device. The UI will warn you, but it will let you do it. The easiest way to add redundancy in the future, if you don't want to blow away the entire pool (and if your hardware is otherwise suitable for production), is to add a second disk as a mirror of the first, which you can do through the GUI. You can then add additional mirrored pairs of disks as your storage requirements grow.

 

[fahadshery]

Hi @danb35,

I have a mirror raid10 with 4 x SSD 12Gbps drives. I have one spare SSD which I was thinking to create a pool out of to use it for iSCSI.
I know its discouraged, but I will taking full backup of this on my other drives (in case of drive failure). I wish to store Postgres data on it!
The question is if I create a pool of a single SSD, are there any overheads such as padding etc.? Does it effect IOPS as well i.e. decreased IOPS?

thanks

 

[maxx]

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.

I realize this is an old thread but I thought i'd explain my case. My Truenas board was recently upgraded and I ended up with a few idle cores/threads and thought of maybe offloading some torrenting onto the NAS box. Initially I allocated the disk space from one of my pools until I wondered if I really needed the RAIDZ1 drives moving together every time a torrent morsel was written to disk was a good idea. Not only from a mechanical aspect but also from a fragmentation aspect. So I created a 1 drive pool and have been using that as the scratch disk and once the file is complete I move it as one chunk into the RAIDZ1 pool. If there's a better way, i'm all ears!

 

[eugrus]

Is it may be possible to install FreeNAS onto a USB stick and use the internal drive for storage?

 

[danb35]

Of course. USB sticks aren't really recommended, but they can be used.

 

[eugrus]

Of course. USB sticks aren't really recommended, but they can be used.

Then the following question: is a lot going to go wrong if I preinstall FreeNAS onto a USB-drive and then boot from that drive on a different computer? I need a solution for a remote location with no-one tech savvy on the ground there. So I want to preconfigure a system including OpenVPN, so that all left to be done by hands at the remote location would be to boot from that USB and forward ports 22 and 1194 to let me in and configure the rest (pools, shares, docker, VMs) remotely.

 

[danb35]

is a lot going to go wrong if I preinstall FreeNAS onto a USB-drive and then boot from that drive on a different computer?

If it's the same hardware, nothing at all. If not, network reconfiguration might be required on the remote end.

 

[eugrus]

If it's the same hardware, nothing at all. If not, network reconfiguration might be required on the remote end.

You probably mean that the /dev/* for the NIC would be different? The DHCP client won't "just work" with the new NIC in that case?

 

[danb35]

Right, the device name may be different. Thus, if you've done manual configuration of the network, you may need to redo it. If it's just the default "DHCP on whatever interface", you shouldn't need to mess with it.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Of course. USB sticks aren't really recommended, but they can be used.

Not recommended means that the USB stick (unless it is expensive enterprise gear) will die very quickly under the write load. It is probably ok to use for the initial setup, as mentioned. But that setup would then need to include steps to move the boot drive to some SSD in the machine. Alternatively, there are adapters that present an SSD via USB. This means that the more durable SSD NAND would be used as a USB stick.

 

[mgerdts]

No, this is the only possible behavior. FreeNAS requires the boot device to be separate from data, and it always has. If that's unacceptable to you, you'll need to find a different NAS OS.

With minimal hacking…

1. Install TrueNAS on the internal drive. It created partitions: 512K boot, 16G swap, remainder in freebsd-zfs.
2. zfs snapshot -r boot-pool@install; zfs send -R boot-pool@install | gzip > /tmp/zfs.gz
3. zpool destroy boot-pool
4. gpart resize -i 3 50G ada0
5. zpool create boot-pool /dev/ada0p3
6. gzip -dc < /tmp/zfs.gz | zfs receive -F boot-pool
7. zpool set bootfs=boot-pool/ROOT/default boot-pool
8. gpart add -t freebsd-zfs
9. zpool create stuff /dev/ada0p4
10. zpool export stuff
11. reboot

After rebooting I was able to import the stuff pool.

Surely this is a fragile config. I’m ok with that, it is just a playground to learn about TrueNAS and FreeBSD.

 

[GrimmReaperNL]

I'm on TrueNAS-SCALE-22.12.1 and trying to create a pool with only one NVMe SSD for plex meta data.
In the pool creation screen I can add the drive to a data vdev, it only option I have is to make it striped.
'Create' is greyed out. When I tick the 'force' option and confirm, 'Create' stays greyed out.

I've tried tricking it by removing the 'disabled=true' in the page's html, but it didn't bite.

How can I make a pool using only this one device?

 

[GrimmReaperNL]

I'm on TrueNAS-SCALE-22.12.1 and trying to create a pool with only one NVMe SSD for plex meta data.
In the pool creation screen I can add the drive to a data vdev, it only option I have is to make it striped.
'Create' is greyed out. When I tick the 'force' option and confirm, 'Create' stays greyed out.

I've tried tricking it by removing the 'disabled=true' in the page's html, but it didn't bite.

How can I make a pool using only this one device?

Figured out my issue.. I forgot to give the pool a name.. My bad.

 

[antony3165]

hi,
i'm new using TrueNas.
i have 2 storage (WD Harddrive 500gb for truenas OS) and 1 SSD 256GB for data/storage.
why at pool i can't create a new pool?
there was an error :
Caution: A stripe data vdev is highly discouraged and will result in data loss if it fails

could you guys help me?

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

i have 2 storage (WD Harddrive 500gb for truenas OS) and 1 SSD 256GB for data/storage.
why at pool i can't create a new pool?
there was an error :
Caution: A stripe data vdev is highly discouraged and will result in data loss if it fails

Your SSD should be used as a boot drive. TrueNAS doesn't share the boot drive for data storage, it's only a boot and OS device. Go with that, it'll save you a lot of trouble later.

The 2 WD 500 GB need to both be selected.

• They can be striped (RAID-0 which in ZFS is Z0, 1TB total storage), but if one fails all the data on both drives is lost, hence the warning in red.
• They preferably would act as a mirrored set (RAID-1 / ZFS Z1) so if one fails the other has the data.

This is simplifying the matter greatly, but it should help with understanding the basics.

Your best bet is to look at the top of the page under Resources and study the
Hardware Recommendations Guide

and under Documentation look for TrueCORE:

Documentation Hub

Home page for the TrueNAS documentation projects.

www.truenas.com