QNAP to TrueNAS Scale - migrate data by physically moving discs?

[Lord Baldrick]

I've got an old four bay QNAP that's playing up (as of tonight it won't connect to my network) ... it's got four HDDs set up as two RAID 1 arrays (i.e. mirrored).

I'm thinking of building something myself based on TrueNAS, in part so I can also use it to run stuff like Home Assistant & PlexMediaServer.

The question is how to get my data transferred from the discs in the QNAP on to the TrueNAS. What I'd really like to do is just physically move the discs ... but having not done this before (or even rebuilt a mirror from a single disc (resilvering?)) I wonder: is it possible? Is it easy? Would the safer thing to do be to take a single disc from each array and rebuild an array (using a new disc, or even a new pair) from that one disc?

Apologies if this question has been asked before but when I searched about migrating all I found was how to speed up copying over networks or similar ;-)

 

[morganL]

Not possible since QNAP does not use ZFS. Best current approach is rsync.

If all your QNAP data is accessible via SMB, then Cobia (SCALE 23.10) has a way of mounting the SMB share and sucking it into TrueNAS. Yes, TrueNAS does suck!

I need to find the docs to link...

 

[Lord Baldrick]

Thanks. I've got the QNAP working again but think it's time to upgrade so I've been investigating hardware ... there's a ridiculous amount of variation in Supermicro boards ... and I've only just found out a motherboard that can take >128Gb RAM is pretty pointless given the supported CPUs can't handle more than that. I'll create another thread once I've got a better idea of what I think I need!

 

[danb35]

I've only just found out a motherboard that can take >128Gb RAM is pretty pointless given the supported CPUs can't handle more than that.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying (i.e., if this comment is saying it's pointless for TrueNAS or for some other application), but TrueNAS supports CPUs that can take far more than 128 GB of RAM. To name just one example, it supports my Xeon Gold 6132s, which (in my current motherboard) support up to 2 TB of RAM each.

Be sure to run any cunning plans past us before potentially spending money on suboptimal hardware.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Even my beloved rather low-end A2SDi series take 256 G.

 

[Lord Baldrick]

Sorry, my point was orthogonal to the original subject of this message...

@danb35 that confuses me because according to Intel those CPUs can handle up to 768Gb each. I've been looking at X11 and X12 motherboards which IIRC handle maximum memory configurations between 64Gb and 2Tb but the processors max out at 128Gb (e.g. Xeon E-2226 or E-2336).

@Patrick wow I see the Epic 7000 series can take up to 2Tb per socket!

I'll do some more research (and maybe look at multi-socket boards, and AMD boards both of which I've so far shied away from) and come back (on a new thread) with my thoughts ... and very much welcome everyone's thoughts! Thanks.

 

[danb35]

because according to Intel those CPUs can handle up to 768Gb each.

I'll admit I'm taking Supermicro's word for this (though that isn't that big of a difference per-CPU); I don't anticipate coming anywhere close to that between two CPUs, much less per-CPU.

X11 and X12 motherboards which IIRC handle maximum memory configurations between 64Gb and 2Tb but the processors max out at 128Gb (e.g. Xeon E-2226 or E-2336)

I think you're confusing motherboard series. The E-2226 is a FCLGA1151 chip, while the E-2336 is FCLGA1200. The X11 boards that support the former support up to 128 GB of RAM--there are other X11 boards with different sockets (like my X11DPH-T) that will support much more RAM, but not with an E-2226. The same is true with the X12 boards--those with the FCLGA1200 sockets support not more than 128 GB of RAM.