SATA to USB3.0 adapter data transfer to TrueNAS

[wolfsbora]

Hi all,

Thank you for this amazing forum! I have learned quite a bit thanks to my many searches here.

I did a search on this before and found a couple of relevant posts but not exactly what I'm looking for.

I recently bought 2 servers configured with TrueNAS because I need to store massive video files. I shoot in 4K 12-bit RAW and it fills a 1TB SSD being used by a recording monitor very quickly. My secondary camera shoots in 4K 10-bit which also consumes plenty of space. Lastly, I am a photographer and store those as well. I can transfer about 256GB over my network when hard wired. 256GB is about the max I can do. Anything more and it simply takes too long often timing out because of my laptop. I have a SATA to USB3.0 adapter and a SATA to USB-C adapter. My servers do not have USB-C sadly. Regardless, it doesn't appear that TrueNAS recognizes the USB3.0 adapter. Am I missing something? Thanks!

My details:
I have 2 x TrueNAS servers each with:
2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2690 0 @ 2.90GHz
12 x 3TB Sun HDDs in RAID10 - 18TB useable/18TB mirrored
256GB RAM

 

[Arwen]

TrueNAS was not designed to use USB drives. It can use USB drives for import, but it's generally less than ideal. (NAS = NETWORK Attached Storage)

Even if your USB attached SATA drive was recognized as a device, the file system also needs to be recognized as something TrueNAS supports. Since you are dealing with huge files, it's possible the external storage device is using Microsoft's ExFat, which is problematic for Unix type servers. ExFat will probably be supported soon, may even be now, I don't know.

What file system does your external device use?

 

[wolfsbora]

Thank you but I do know what NAS stands for and what it means. But like I said, and as I'm sure you can imagine, moving 1TB over the network is problematic. TrueNAS does have a baked in way to make the transfer over USB. I know how the drive should appear in the GUI, the issue is that it just doesn't recognize it. I have a feeling it is the adapter that is causing the problem. I'm most likely going to add PCIe USB-C cards to each of the servers.

The recording monitor uses exFAT.

 

[Arwen]

Yes, moving huge files over the network can be slow... so I understand your need for locally attached storage for the initial import.

Can you find a known working USB drive, and make a ExFAT on it?
Then put some smaller files on it, and try it on TrueNAS?

This is just to test another drive with ExFAT. If your TrueNAS can't recognize that drive, it's possible the the "recording monitor" creates a version of ExFAT that TrueNAS can't understand.