Truenas Scale mount exist ext4 disk for SMB

[BeardyDude]

Yeah I know there are ways around it. I'm passing through a second (well, third actually!) HBA to a VM to access some ext4 disks already. But, these ways all tend to variously suck. Rsync is slow as mud, zpool send/receive only works if it's zfs at both ends - and as soon as you do anything over the network rather than locally, things get very slow!

Also - these are just ways to move data to ZFS - whilst that's usually a good idea, it's not *always*. Sometimes you don't want a migration, or want to handle it manually and more slowly - "cleaning house" whilst moving across - or asking users to DIY part of the process.

I know a full featured "migration module" would be a lot of work to implement - though it would definitely add value, not only for the freeloaders (like me at home!) but making it an easier sell to smaller business. However, simply being able to mount the drives "officially" from the UI would let you put them to use in samba, containers and more quite easily - with the aforementioned warning flag that you're losing out by not using ZFS :)

Going off track a bit though, and thinking of small business - more could be done on that front! "Contact us to discuss a quote" puts off a lot of potential smaller customers. A couple of retail friendly, 4-8 drive synology/qnap alternatives, sold in one spec only with a clear up front price would present a good alternative some firms might "pick up off shelf of the internet" - especially with a consultant who uses and enjoys ZFS/free/truenas already advising them! They don't always want to "discuss their needs and design a solution", sometimes they just want to get their card out :)

 

[morganL]

Going off track a bit though, and thinking of small business - more could be done on that front! "Contact us to discuss a quote" puts off a lot of potential smaller customers. A couple of retail friendly, 4-8 drive synology/qnap alternatives, sold in one spec only with a clear up front price would present a good alternative some firms might "pick up off shelf of the internet" - especially with a consultant who uses and enjoys ZFS/free/truenas already advising them! They don't always want to "discuss their needs and design a solution", sometimes they just want to get their card out :)

Totally agree .. that perfectly describes the TrueNAS Minis that we provide via Amazon and via our TrueNAS Mini configurator. https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

The Mini Configurator lets you choose drives and cache devices... the whole system gets built and tested before shipping. On Amazon, there are a few standard configurations and diskless units.

 

[BeardyDude]

Totally agree .. that perfectly describes the TrueNAS Minis that we provide via Amazon and via our TrueNAS Mini configurator. https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

The Mini Configurator lets you choose drives and cache devices... the whole system gets built and tested before shipping. On Amazon, there are a few standard configurations and diskless units.

Not in the UK you don't :) Your resellers over here would rather sell contracted bigger systems, and it's also behind a "quote me" veil.

Might I suggest shipping a batches for sale by FBA direct!

 

[morganL]

Not in the UK you don't :) Your resellers over here would rather sell contracted bigger systems, and it's also behind a "quote me" veil.

Might I suggest shipping a batches for sale by FBA direct!

Thanks... International availability is improving , but not there for Minis yet. Hope to improve this later this year, but right now the challenge is keeping up with demand while there are global component shortages.

 

[Adrian]

I am in the UK and have 3 FreeNAS Minis bought from Amazon US (Mini in 2015, Mini XL+ in 2019) and a Mini XL bought somewhere in between direct from iXsystems. I am toying with buying another XL+. Amazon no longer ship Minis to the UK, but your configurator allowed me to get to the checkout page.

 

[BeardyDude]

Well yeah if you're determined you can get hold of one and I'm fully aware of the mini and have been for years :P

The point is, few clients in a commercial setting are going to be enamoured with the idea of ordering something they've not heard of from the USA, with shipping costs, duties and delays involved, if you suggest it over a Synology or Qnap.

 

[morganL]

Well yeah if you're determined you can get hold of one and I'm fully aware of the mini and have been for years :P

The point is, few clients in a commercial setting are going to be enamoured with the idea of ordering something they've not heard of from the USA, with shipping costs, duties and delays involved, if you suggest it over a Synology or Qnap.

Is the Mini-X+ the model that would be sufficient?

 

[BeardyDude]

Is the Mini-X+ the model that would be sufficient?

Probably not tbh, I think it's a middle ground that's not as sought after.

Whilst all the mini's seem like great little machines, from my experience (charity IT manager dealing with a few affiliates for 6 odd years then a couple of years consulting) smaller clients don't seem to care about specs that much!

About £599 for something "good" (tm) with 4+ bays and about £999 for 8 bays (empty pricing) would be on the money, so after a rough gut estimate of the taxes and exchange rates, the current pricing on the E / XL+ is riding a a little high. I know they're better - but people understand drive bays, it takes more to convince them on RAM, CPU and cache SSD in a NAS. And most clients only care about gigabit, so only need ~110MB/s throughput, so in a way, they're right not to care on the specs too much.

 

[Arwen]

@BeardyDude In essence, their is always a small / niche market for computers that have specific configurations. For example, if computer was designed as a NAS with lower end CPU, (2 core / 2 or 4 thread?), 1 x DIMM slot, 4 disk slots and 1 x 1Gbps Ethernet, and simple USB expansion, (meaning no PCIe slots), it would be cheaper. But, others would find it too limiting.

It's all about trade offs. If their is not enough market for a product, it either does not get offered. Or, stops being sold.


When I went searching for my next home server in 2014, I wanted something small, lower power and yet able to perform updates much faster than my prior home server. (Note this was not a NAS per say, it was more print server, media server, master copy of my scripts and other things).

There were literally too many choices if I relaxed the configuration choices slightly. Even after I made a choice, it still came with extras I have not used to this day, (2nd Ethernet, WiFi, 2 x HDMI, LTE SIM card support, audio, replaceable front panel for expansion).

 

[morganL]

I know they're better - but people understand drive bays, it takes more to convince them on RAM, CPU and cache SSD in a NAS. And most clients only care about gigabit, so only need ~110MB/s throughput, so in a way, they're right not to care on the specs too much.

I think you are right, but it is a business decision we have made to not focus on the "don't care" market.. We add ECC and IPMI and make sure every system has the RAM to perform and add jails. Other companies make boards and bend sheetmetal and are better suited to just providing drive bays. For that lower end market we provide the free software. For users that care about reliability, support/manageability and performance, we provide the systems.

 

[BeardyDude]

I think you are right, but it is a business decision we have made to not focus on the "don't care" market.. We add ECC and IPMI and make sure every system has the RAM to perform and add jails. Other companies make boards and bend sheetmetal and are better suited to just providing drive bays. For that lower end market we provide the free software. For users that care about reliability, support/manageability and performance, we provide the systems.

Yep, and it's a worthy choice - you make excellent devices that are a great fit for the right organisations. It's just a shame finding those organisations is a little tricky - rich and aware enough to support a sound technical choice (over a more mass-market NAS device) but not large enough/ rich enough to push further on to the higher end SAN oriented competition.

The software too - let's get this clear, I appreciate it hugely and have found it an ideal match for many personal and professional circumstances! - is also stuck somewhere in the middle. It's professional focus deters many who like the "easy" features, flexibility, setup and integration of synology etc, whilst I would imagine - I've not been responsible for sourcing in this position personally! - losing some higher end clients by it's limited expansion options. Single appliances from larger vendors seem sold as "the first rung on a ladder" which Truenas can't quite match - work on scale notwithstanding, though that's not in quite the same classic direction anyway.

Hopefully hyperconvergence in smaller organisations will mature with TN-S and provide a lucrative licensing income from truecommand - not much room to sell hardware into that market, unless you fancy jumping into the shark tank with Dell/HPE etc!

It's a right shame HP stopped selling the super-affordable Microservers on cashback, I know a lot of personal and commercial contacts that put them to fruitful use with FreeNAS! Through the N36L to Gen8 it was a no brainer in a lot of circumstances.

@BeardyDude In essence, their is always a small / niche market for computers that have specific configurations. For example, if computer was designed as a NAS with lower end CPU, (2 core / 2 or 4 thread?), 1 x DIMM slot, 4 disk slots and 1 x 1Gbps Ethernet, and simple USB expansion, (meaning no PCIe slots), it would be cheaper. But, others would find it too limiting.

You're right, some would find it limiting, but limitations can themselves become a selling point, if packaged well and the simplicity and economies of scale exploited! If it was my call, I'd sell 1 model of TN mini, 4 drives, as cheap as possible with decent gigabit throughput, to encourage more organisations into the ecosystem. Then I'd rebrand the rest as a "TN midi", fully configurable line alongside the R, X and M options.

 

[Selassie]

To re-iterate @bodly, you can use single disk ZFS pools. I have them all over for my backup disks, and alternate boot media for my computers, (MicroSDXC card in my media server, USB flash drive on my desktop & laptop).

Their are advantages of using ZFS even in a single disk pool:

• Compression, (not as important for pre-compressed media files, but does not hurt to enable it)
• No more long file system check at boot. (Even if it only occurs every 3 months, a 8 or 10TB disk can take hours to perform a file system check with EXT4. I know, tried it in a real production data center...)
• Scrubs. Even if ZFS can't fix the problem for you, knowing you have a corrupt file makes a serious difference. I have gotten perhaps 8/10 corrupt media files on my media server over the last 5 years, that does not use any redundancy. Most of those were larger, video files, (which I guess increased the statistically probability they would get a bad block). Knowing about the bad files allowed me to restore them from backup.
• Redundancy for metadata, including directory entries is enabled by default. This can help prevent an entire directories' worth of data vanishing because of a bad block. ZFS CAN and WILL fix these automatically on read, (or scrub), even on a pool without data redundancy.
• Using "copies=2" on specific datasets for more important data is possible, to get data redundancy on single disk pools.
• Last, ZFS will never give you a block of data that failed it's checksum. If that means your program trying to access the file fails, so be it. Other file systems will gladly hand you a bad block, and not know better.

But, I do agree, TrueNAS Scale is not quite ready for some people. And OMV may be the best option for you, and others. (That's what is nice today, their ARE options, free ones.)

Arwen,

I am using Truenas core for my Storage and have recently set up Truenas Scale on a separate machine to run apps such as Plex, NZBGet, Radar and Radarr. I want to use Scale because it is much easier to set up the apps using Docker than using Jails. Also, I will use a much faster processor on Scale to run the Apps than what I am currently using in Truenas Core for Storage.

I would like to have a mount point on the Truenas Scale server, which connects to a share of the storage machine's media (Truenas Core). How can this be done? I understand how to do this in Ubuntu Server. I would just make a mount point in the Fstab. In Truenas Scale to mount the media share, I can't see a way to mount an external share as a mount point only shares from an internal dataset.

Can you assist?

 

[Arwen]

@Selassie - No, sorry, I am not using TrueNAS SCALE, (yet?). And I have very minimal knowledge of SCALE's containers.

You should create a new thread on the subject.

 

[sretalla]

I would like to have a mount point on the Truenas Scale server, which connects to a share of the storage machine's media (Truenas Core).

Have a look here:

SOLVED - TrueNAS as a network client

Hi, are there any plans to add this funcationity to scale? I have two boxes (one currently with unraid on it) and and have come back to look at the state of TrueNAS on my dev box. Looking very nice I have to say! However, I don't seem to be able to connect it to network storage (other than...

www.truenas.com