New to FreeNAS

[itzmillertime]

Hi I'm new to FreeNAS and wanted to know if there is a way to transfer my 4TB volume with my media already on it into FreeNAS or do I need another volume added first?

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

Yes, you need a landing spot for your data first. There is no conversion option.

Welcome to FreeNAS.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[itzmillertime]

Yes, you need a landing spot for your data first. There is no conversion option.

Welcome to FreeNAS.

Cheers,
Matt

And is it best to put OS on a USB or maybe on my m.2 drive. My goal is to make a FreeNAS HTPC Plex server. That is all it will be used for

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

USB is perfectly acceptable and very common - a pair of 16G or 32G quality USB sticks is fine and doesn't take up SATA ports which you may want for storage drives. I wouldn't boot from an M.2 drive simply because FreeNAS doesn't get any real benefit from a super fast boot device once it is up and running and they are still mighty expensive.

If you have plenty of bays and ports, you can use whatever small, cheap, low performance SATA drives you have on hand for the boot partition. This is a little more reliable than USB sticks but also uses more power which is why some people still choose USB to boot.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[itzmillertime]

USB is perfectly acceptable and very common - a pair of 16G or 32G quality USB sticks is fine and doesn't take up SATA ports which you may want for storage drives. I wouldn't boot from an M.2 drive simply because FreeNAS doesn't get any real benefit from a super fast boot device once it is up and running and they are still mighty expensive.

If you have plenty of bays and ports, you can use whatever small, cheap, low performance SATA drives you have on hand for the boot partition. This is a little more reliable than USB sticks but also uses more power which is why some people still choose USB to boot.

Cheers,
Matt

Thanks for your help

 

[danb35]

This is a little more reliable than USB sticks

A SATA SSD would be significantly more reliable that a USB stick, and I doubt it would draw much more power. It would also be significantly faster, but that isn't often a real issue (most of the OS lives in RAM most of the time due to ZFS caching). But it does take a SATA port, which are sometimes in short supply.