Importing Drives From NasOS (Seagate)

[klos]

Hi there,
Recently built out a Proxmox home server, and I've decided to run TrueNAS for local file sharing and to host a Plex server.

I have 3 4TB drives that were used in an old Seagate NAS running NasOS box that weren't in any sort of RAID config. Two of the drives were storing raw photography and videography data, and the 3rd drive was exclusively used for my Plex media server. NasOS had a Plex container that worked alright, but doesn't support transcoding, and generally was very slow.

I was wondering if it is possible to utilize the drives in TrueNAS without wiping the drives? Or is my best bet to buy another drive and copy all of the data over?

Thanks for the help!

 

[jgreco]

Welcome to the forums.

TrueNAS is designed to work with a ZFS pool. While it might be possible to get your existing disks mounted (perhaps to copy data), you really do need a native ZFS pool on your TrueNAS system. Please also note that many drives 8TB or less these days are SMR formatted, which is essentially incompatible with ZFS. Please make sure any new drive you buy is a CMR drive.

I also recommend reviewing the virtualization guide in the Resources/Advanced section.

 

[klos]

Welcome to the forums.

TrueNAS is designed to work with a ZFS pool. While it might be possible to get your existing disks mounted (perhaps to copy data), you really do need a native ZFS pool on your TrueNAS system. Please also note that many drives 8TB or less these days are SMR formatted, which is essentially incompatible with ZFS. Please make sure any new drive you buy is a CMR drive.

I also recommend reviewing the virtualization guide in the Resources/Advanced section.

Thanks you for the welcome and your reply.

I was looking at purchasing a 8 or 10TB WD Red Plus drive (they’re on sale right now) which I believe to be CMR. Is that a decent choice?

I’ll probably just use the 4TB drives for redundant archival storage of my raw videography data.

 

[jgreco]

I have had good luck with the shucked WD drives from external EasyStore's available at Best Buy. Shucking refers to the process of removing them from their plastic enclosures without doing damage, which allows for the potential RMA of the drives to WD if any fail. These drives are usually white label versions of the WD Red -- the fine people over at Reddit have a datahoarders discussion about specific models if that is of interest to you.

The following article explains shucking.

EasyStore Drive Shucking like a pro ... by a pro

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. It has been quite common, for many years, for there to be awesome deals on large capacity hard drives by major vendors on Black Friday. The...

www.truenas.com

I have done this for something more than 100 but probably less than 200 drives over the last half a decade, and it seems to be very reliable. I posted a picture last year of all the boxes that we discarded, which would be drives three years or older. Out of the 55 discarded, zero had failed. I also cannot recall any of the within-warranty drives having failed.

WD has made a mess of their product lines with the SMR debacle so I refrain from making statements about "WD Red Plus". The main problems to consider are:

SMR drives will be beaten to death by ZFS, CMR will be fine
7200 RPM drives run hotter and you need to insure sufficient cooling. At one time I believe all WD Red Plus were 7200... I think? But now I think the 7200's are mostly called "Pro".
Some of the larger capacity drives may be "stealth" 7200 drives that report as 5900. This affects power and cooling requirements.

These issues may not matter to you especially if you are not going for redundancy on the pool. Perhaps you didn't ask about this; I'm just trying to look busy this morning avoiding some work.