Install to single disk

[jh207]

Hello, I'm trying to set up a tinkering lab with TrueNAS Scale, and the system I have available to me has a large single disk.

I can't find any clear instruction on how to actually use TrueNAS with this single disk, it's monopolized by the boot pool so I can't do much.

Would appreciate a resource, thank you.

 

[jgreco]

I can't find any clear instruction on how to actually use TrueNAS with this single disk, it's monopolized by the boot pool so I can't do much.

You're out of luck. TrueNAS expects you to have at least one device dedicated as a boot device. It's recommended that this be a smallish SSD of some sort. You are expected to have additional disks to manage as a storage pool. It is inherent to the design of the system. You are not expected to be able to store things on a single disk system.

That *is* the official answer. I will point out that it is not impossible to go cowboy offroading and trying to partition the disk and then install TrueNAS on part of it, but lots of things won't work right. It isn't recommended, and you need a fairly good knowledge of FreeBSD or Linux to try.

 

[jh207]

Bummer, do they not assume people manage disks at the controller card? Guess i'll circle back some other time... ty

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Get a small affordable boot disk, e.g. a Transcend 370S series SSD. Or if you only want to toy with TrueNAS a bit, a USB drive. Not recommended for production, because they frequently wear out fast.

 

[jgreco]

Bummer, do they not assume people manage disks at the controller card?

No, they do not make such an assumption. ZFS is designed to handle arrays of hard drives, large arrays. Controller cards do not manage disks unless they are RAID cards, and RAID cards are bad juju with ZFS. See

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

TrueNAS is not intended to be a solution for every use case, and you are expected to supply hardware that meets the hardware requirements, rather than griping that the developers didn't accommodate your use case. The purpose of the freeware versions of TrueNAS is to serve as a testbed for TrueNAS Enterprise, the product that iXsystems sells to corporate users and that pays the salaries of the development team. There is no enterprise market for a NAS device that boots from a HDD and also stores files on that. Anyone can set up a Windows box to do that. The interesting capability with ZFS is being able to set up a high reliability, high performance storage system that can store 100 terabytes as easily as a petabyte. If that's not your use case, you may be in the wrong place.