TrueNas Scale Thunderbolt 3 Storage Enclosure Support

[amplustestis]

I am looking to build a TrueNas Scale system using a Thunderbolt 3 external storage enclosure attached to something like an Intel NUC. I have not been able to find whether TrueNas Scale will support this configuration, as prior discussion on Thunderbolt is dated and related to TrueNas Core.

Has anyone successfully used a Thunderbolt 3 storage enclosure with TrueNas Scale? Are there any gotchas?

 

[jgreco]

There is no work that I am aware of specifically targeted at Thunderbolt support. It may be that something came along "for free" with Scale. However, in general, both ZFS and TrueNAS are finicky about device attachment, and enclosures tend to be a bit dicey.

 

[morganL]

Suggest you check whether Debian Bullseye includes Thunderbolt support...if so, its possible, but won't be in WebUI or REST API.

 

[artlessknave]

why? in what way is this better than the standard builds that are recommended and used most?

 

[dcuccia]

Thanks OP, I am wondering the same thing.

@artlessknave: why? in what way is this better than the standard builds that are recommended and used most?

For me, it's because I'd like to experiment in a non-production homelab with stuff I already have. Per discussion here, I'd like to adopt a community-recommended NIC for 10G networking, but do not have an internal slot (Intel NUC 8). Thunderbolt 3 is a perfect fit for this scenario, IMO.

 

[artlessknave]

experiment

ok, that's fair. we get a little "don't do that" because there are so many people who come here expecting their cheapo realtek USB on their laptop with USB drives to not lose their data...and only come here for help after something went wrong, when its often too late. many of us regulars hugely loathe risky data setups, and cringe at many of these.

 

[amplustestis]

Thanks OP, I am wondering the same thing.



For me, it's because I'd like to experiment in a non-production homelab with stuff I already have. Per discussion here, I'd like to adopt a community-recommended NIC for 10G networking, but do not have an internal slot (Intel NUC 8). Thunderbolt 3 is a perfect fit for this scenario, IMO.

Thanks, everyone. The reason I am looking at this is twofold:
(a) Use what I already have to contain costs
(b) Decouple compute and storage

 

[dak180]

I have not been able to find whether TrueNas Scale will support this configuration, as prior discussion on Thunderbolt is dated and related to TrueNas Core.

Ultimately thunderbolt is an external 4x pcie interconnect so how well things will work I would assume (I have not tested this in any way) will largely be dependent on the disk controller in the breakout box. So I would expect things to go better with a sas/lsi one as opposed to a cheap sata controller; it will certainly be an interesting experiment.

 

[dcuccia]

A few more details on my own experiment/journey here. Can't tell if I'm making progress (can see external TB3 chipset - yay! can't see well-supported NIC - boo!)...

 

[jthat]

I have a Mac Mini 2018 with an OWC ThunderBay 8 TB3 enclosure, which I recently migrated from CORE. I don't know if network devices work, as I don't yet have the hardware.

The only hiccup I had to get this working was the ThunderBay was not getting authorized on bootup. I found an article on the arch wiki which had a simple solution as a udev rule that solved the problem:

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="thunderbolt", ATTR{authorized}=="0", ATTR{authorized}="1"

Previously, it just worked with TrueNAS CORE, which must be configured to authorize thunderbolt devices like this by default. I'm not sure if that was by nature of it being a FreeBSD default, or whether it's something that was specifically enabled by CORE. Either way, I'd like to propose the above udev solution for consideration in SCALE.

Note I've added a comment in NAS-114855 with this information.

 

[fabiolanza]

Hi @jthat, I added this udev rule but it did not fix the issue for me. I have a Thunderbolt NVMe enclosure on my Thunderbolt port that is not recognized on TrueNAS. Is there any test that I can do to ensure that this udev rule has been loaded? Thanks, Fabio.

 

[ChrisRJ]

The critical point with such setup is what "it works" really means. In general, when we talk about an enterprise-level NAS like TrueNAS, making something boot and share a few files in a happy-path scenario, does not qualify as working. The latter means that whatever happens to the system, no data will be lost. Admittedly, that is a somewhat paranoid position.

So for testing purposes a setup like the ones described should be fine. But to really entrust valuable data to such a system is not something I would personally do. One can argue about backups being there, just in case. But then, why bother with ZFS in the first place?

 

[fabiolanza]

Hi @ChrisRJ, thanks for the message. In my case, I run TrueNAS Scale at home for my personal cloud. I have all my data in ZFS with multiple disks. However, running VMs on them is slow. Therefore, I had the idea to use additional NVMe drive on Thunderbolt to have fast storage for the VMs only (which are snapshotted and restorable). If my plug my NVMe on the USB port, it works. It does not when I plug it to the Thunderbolt 3 port.