Question about iXsystem's (diskless) TrueNAS Mini X/X+

[winnielinnie]

My friend is considering purchasing a TrueNAS Mini X (or X+), but wants to supply his own drives. It's going to serve as a simple, yet reliable home NAS and direct-stream server. Nothing fancy. No virtualization, no VMs.

He prefers not to hunt for ECC RAM and a compatible motherboard, not to mention he prefers a tried-and-true prebuilt system.

A diskless TrueNAS Mini X appeals to him. My question is, does it come pre-installed with TrueNAS Core if it contains no drives in any of the bays? If he doesn't even select a single SSD to include in the purchase, what device makes up the boot-pool? I could not find any mention of an M.2 / NVMe drive. Does someone know offhand or could point me to documentation about the boot-pool drive for the TrueNAS Mini X system?

 

[ornias]

The bootdrives are not on the SSD in the SSD slot but on a small plugin module in the SATA port (A sata DOM).
That should (TM) still be there if bought without drives :)

 

[winnielinnie]

Okay, good to know! It's not made very clear on the "Customize and Buy" page, nor anywhere I could find Specifications on the X/X+. Either I'm missing it or it doesn't exist on the web page?

I'll pass this info on to him, since he wanted to know if he needed to select at least one SSD in his purchase.

 

[morganL]

The boot drive information is there when you hover over a configuration option. I can see how it can be missed, but its the tradeoff between visual simplicity and technical detail.

 

[ornias]

its the tradeoff between visual simplicity and technical detail.

Quick note:
Primarily because it's always there and doesn't have multiple options. So showing it prominently is kinda clutery.

 

[winnielinnie]

I can see how it can be missed, but its the tradeoff between visual simplicity and technical detail.

Definitely didn't catch that, but good to see!

However, one more question, since the tooltip doesn't display it:

How large is the SATA-DOM? I ask because from what I understand, during the TrueNAS installation, it will only prompt you to create a 16GB swap on the boot device if it is at least 64GB (and not a USB disk).

I could be mistaken, and that might have changed recently? Is it possible to have the installer create a smaller swap on the boot device if it happens to be less than 64GB total capacity? I don't think my friend would care either way, but it's something I'd like to know (and possibly consider for future reference.) Otherwise, it means the user is beholden to swap being housed on spinning platters of their data drives, meanwhile their boot device is mostly being wasted, as the OS + System Dataset itself consumes under 2GB. <--- Even reserving 8GB (or 16GB) of swap from this 16GB (or 32GB) boot drive would be much more useful than leaving over 80% of it empty and unused, plus the system would never use spinning platters for swap (if per chance someone's RAM is stretched beyond the limits.)

If one cannot place swap on the SATA-DOM during installation, is it because iXsystems wants to encourage users to place swap on redundant media to prevent a crash if the boot drive were to ever fail in a live system? Regardless, I think allowing a user to place even an 8GB swap on their SATA-DOM boot drive should be allowed, albeit with a warning message.

Note: For my own build on a fresh install, my boot-pool consists of two mirrored SSDs, and thus a mirrored 16GB swap (e.g, /dev/mirror/swap0.eli).

 

[Constantin]

For my Mini XL (previous generation), the SATADOM had a 16GB capacity. It still works. I never found the capacity an issue, just plan on "mowing the lawn" every couple of updates to eliminate excess system images / boot files. The nice thing about the SATADOM is that you don't clutter the case with a big drive when a tiny one will do.

My current 64GB SATADOMs don't have the "problem" of needing periodic trims, but realistically I'm just putting off the inevitable. Sooner or later, you have to trim older system images, especially if you make pool upgrades that older versions of FreeNAS are not compatible with (i.e. sVDEV, for example). Those old system images are then basically useless.

 

[morganL]

16GB SataDOM for Mini E and X .... swap space on data drives by default.
250GB M.2 on X+ and XL+ (oversized, but there's small savings using a smaller one)