Main FreeNAS machine now cleared of Windows (drives removed to new sys)

Bikerchris

Patron
Joined
Mar 22, 2020
Messages
208
So I'm finally happy with, what will become PC2 (snapshot), but in the meantime it's being used as my pathetic Windows server. So useful to have those trayless drives, moving 9TB couldn't have been easier.

My only quandary at the moment is the boot drive (considering mirrored at present), which are 2 250GB Hynix units I've had a for a few years and have seen little action. Part of me wondered whether it would be feasible to partition them and use half for FreeNAS OS and the other half for any VM's I might have. I expect it's safer to go for a mirrored boot and use a third SSD I have for VM playing and Plex install.

Nice to make progress either way, my intention is to buy 1 Ironwolf 4TB drive once a month (or more), until I've got sufficient to provide me with enough storage space (RAIDZ2). Only conflict is that the board has 10 SATA ports and although I have two spare LSI HBA cards + cables, it would be nice not to use them. Despite saying the above, perhaps it's safest to have 1 boot drive, 8 HDD for storage and leave one spare port for when replacing drives is needed. Fortunately the system does have 1 NVMe drive port, perhaps I'll use that for the VM play. In addition, I have PCI adaptor for an additional NVMe drive, so that could come in handy and from memory I did use it with one of my FreeNAS test machines and it happily recognised it, I don't recall whether SMARTCTL picked it up though - I'd check that before evening considering it.

To be continued - as always, thank you to all that have provided me with solid help during this intro. I'm taking it very slow, rushing familiarly would be doomed to failure!
 
Top