Spinning up drives, after initial boot of TrueNAS?

[Videodrome]

Can truenas initialize drives and its pools after it's booted, or does it need everything to happen during the initial boot?

I'm in the process of building a 60 HDD nas system. HBA > LSI 9300-8e.
(about 24 hdd's will be used from the get go, the other spaces are just for expansion over the years).

My main concern would be the initial spin up powerdraw from the wall outlet.
If I can spin up pools separately with their own power supplies after truenas booted, I can create a sort of manual staggered spinup.

It feels obvious to me and I'd be surprised it it wasn't possible, however I couldn't find the right keywords to get an answer.

Thank you.

 

[Ericloewe]

That's not really a TrueNAS problem per se, more of a hardware problem. At least that's how the separation of concerns crystallized in the PC world.

Your idea isn't practical because everything is built around the idea that the drives are available by the time the OS has loaded. But you can configure staggered spin-up in the LSI HBA's firmware - make sure you've installed the UEFI Option ROM and check your system firmware setup menu for the HBA's plug-in menu. It'll contain the option to configure staggered spin-up.

 

[Videodrome]

Thank you, I'll take a look at the HBA bios once it arrives.
Though the old one(9201) didn't show any staggered spinup options that I'm aware of.

And just to confirm, truenas doesn't (automatically) initialize newly spun up drives and starts the pool once all of them are on?

 

[Ericloewe]

And just to confirm, truenas doesn't (automatically) initialize newly spun up drives and starts the pool once all of them are on?

Staggered spin-up takes place before the bootloader runs, so well before TrueNAS can do much of anything. TrueNAS will access all disks on boot to enumerate what's present and what isn't, before it gets to the loading other pools stage.

 

[Videodrome]

I'm talking about a scenario where I want to spin up a pool after an hour/week/month after the initial boot.
This is not possible and I'm forced to reboot the system?

 

[Ericloewe]

Yeah, that's an all-or-nothing scenario, per pool. At the end of the day, if the pool has I/O pending, someone's waiting for it, and that someone would not be happy to wait minutes for their I/O to complete.

 

[Videodrome]

I'd be the only user of that entire server, so that wouldn't be a problem.

So the sequence of events would be.

1. Turn on power.
2. Pool A turns on together with the system.
3. Everything initializes and truenas finished booting.
4. Pool A is online, pool B is not powered and shown as offline.
5. <time passes>
6. I turn on all the drives of pool B.
7. Truenas detects new drives and enables the pool B automatically.
8. Success.

This would work without any issue on truenas?

 

[Ericloewe]

No, at most you could script it with the API. Step 4 is dodgy, 6 needs work, and 7 is not automatic. You could do something similar by allowing the disks to spin down, but you don't get an offline pool - though that does not seem like a disadvantage.

Of course, the usual caveats about spinning your disks up and down a bunch not being good apply.

 

[Videodrome]

Ok, so it is not a working solution to turn on pools later.
I need to spin up everything at boot.

Thank you.