Use new drive as part pool

[hAtul]

So I had a USB with the TrurNAS installed on it, and one of my drives (a pool) has the iocage file system

I have just got a new SSD drive. I installed TrueNAS, threw my old USB inside one of my drawers and uploaded the config file.

I cannot add a new pool from my current new SSD drive (when pressing"add" I don't see it listed), and I wish to move the iocage to the current new drive for better performance.

Under "disks" the new drive is listed as "boot-pool".

What steps should I follow to make that happen?

 

[sretalla]

What steps should I follow to make that happen?

If you want to be supported, you can't do anything.

See here: https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/i-have-to-waste-an-entire-drive-just-for-booting.187/

If you're ready to be on your own in terms of things going wrong with upgrades or whatever, you can do this:

HOWTO: setup a pair of larger SSDs for boot pool and data

Moderator Warning: This HOWTO will damage the ability of your TrueNAS appliance to properly maintain itself, will break the ability to replace failed drives, and may cause problems with upgrades and updates. TrueNAS is not designed to do this sort of partitioning, and the developers are not...

www.truenas.com

You don't need to have a pair, just ignore that (mirroring) part of the setup.

 

[hAtul]

If you want to be supported, you can't do anything.

See here: https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/i-have-to-waste-an-entire-drive-just-for-booting.187/

If you're ready to be on your own in terms of things going wrong with upgrades or whatever, you can do this:

HOWTO: setup a pair of larger SSDs for boot pool and data

Moderator Warning: This HOWTO will damage the ability of your TrueNAS appliance to properly maintain itself, will break the ability to replace failed drives, and may cause problems with upgrades and updates. TrueNAS is not designed to do this sort of partitioning, and the developers are not...

www.truenas.com

You don't need to have a pair, just ignore that (mirroring) part of the setup.

Can you explain briefly about the risks following the second method? What things might go wrong? I want to know how wrong things can get and maybe replacing the drive with something else - would worth my time.
I had everything installed on an 8g USB stick for a while, and I do feel some difference between that and a SSD.

I mainly use TrueNAS for storage over my home network, HA, Plex for streaming and transmission for downloading. Would having my old USB affect the performance? What's the best hardware alternative?

 

[sretalla]

Using an SSD for the boot pool is recommended/standard.

If you want to run jails/VMs/apps, it's often good to do this on one or a mirror of 2 SSDs (additional to the boot pool SSD).

Some people don't like that requirement as many SSDs will be far larger than needed for the boot pool and the remaining space is enough to run jails/VMs/apps... but that isn't how the developers of the appliance system we're using here designed things.

If you decide you don't like it and need to depart from the standard path, it's perfectly workable to do that with the risk that the developers haven't considered what you're doing, so anything they have done or do in the future completely ignores your setup and may therefore damage it somehow (impossible to say how that may manifest, but things like the normal failed disk replacement process are an example of what you can't do already due to being different).

Worst case scenario, you can lose all your jails/apps/VMs and the boot pool together. A config restore and rebuild of the jails, etc would be the "cost" of that.

 

[Etorix]

Can you explain briefly about the risks following the second method? What things might go wrong?

It is not a supported configuration, so anything could go wrong because it has not been tested.
It is unlikely, but not excluded, that it could be broken by a system update.
In case of hardware failure, you'll have to repeat the "HOWTO" procedure to replace the drive since the automated process uses whole drives and not partitions. Though with a single, non-redundant, drive it is likely that you will just lose the data and have to rebuild rather than replace.

Would having my old USB affect the performance?

No, but the strain from holding a ZFS pool will probably cause a USB thumbdrive to fail in a matter of months, even if you move the system dataset (which gets the most writes) to another pool.

What's the best hardware alternative?

To make your life easier, get a separate boot device. The cheapest small SSD you can find will do.
For instance, I hoarded half a dozen Optane M10 16 GB for use as boot drives. Second-hand, 9.99E apiece—one can't argue with that.

 

[joeschmuck]

Some people don't like that requirement as many SSDs will be far larger than needed for the boot pool and the remaining space is enough to run jails/VMs/apps... but that isn't how the developers of the appliance system we're using here designed things.

This is a great point and we see questions like this all too often. Everyone should have the mindset of being cost effective, in other words, if I could buy a SSD at $20 USD that would allow me to boot the system, I shouldn't care if it were a 32GB SSD or a 250GB SSD. It does feel like we would be wasting SSD space but that is the wrong way to look at it. So many people here also care about cost and power consumption, this all factors in of course but cost of an item that meets or exceeds the requirement should be all that really matters. Or a person could change that around and say "The 250GB SSD has a lot of wearlevel life built in." That thing from a wearlevel perspective will never wear out in your lifetime. Just a different perspective.

 

[ChrisRJ]

In addition to what @joeschmuck said, and I fully support his argument, there is also the aspect of "time is money". I know that being active on the forum, or using TrueNAS instead of something like Synology, kind-of defeats that argument already ;-). But on the other hand, we all choose what we want to spend our time with. And I personally think that modifying something that I consider truly business-critical to an unsupported configuration is not a good use of my time.

 

[hAtul]

It is not a supported configuration, so anything could go wrong because it has not been tested.
It is unlikely, but not excluded, that it could be broken by a system update.
In case of hardware failure, you'll have to repeat the "HOWTO" procedure to replace the drive since the automated process uses whole drives and not partitions. Though with a single, non-redundant, drive it is likely that you will just lose the data and have to rebuild rather than replace.


No, but the strain from holding a ZFS pool will probably cause a USB thumbdrive to fail in a matter of months, even if you move the system dataset (which gets the most writes) to another pool.


To make your life easier, get a separate boot device. The cheapest small SSD you can find will do.
For instance, I hoarded half a dozen Optane M10 16 GB for use as boot drives. Second-hand, 9.99E apiece—one can't argue with that.

Thanks
Ok so I found this 17$ 240G Kingston SSD. I'll order it.
For now, I will return my old USB, and want to format the new SSD I got (currently has boot) and turn it to a pool, any idea how I can do that without having to physically remove/use adapters/etc ?
for some weird reason I don't have the wipe btn (for any of my drives) as said here: https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/coretutorials/storage/disks/diskwipe/

 

[Etorix]

Once you have installed on a new SSD, the old one should not be "in use" and the wipe button will activate. If not, export the old boot pool (and you'll get an option to wipe with exporting).

 

[hAtul]

Once you have installed on a new SSD, the old one should not be "in use" and the wipe button will activate. If not, export the old boot pool (and you'll get an option to wipe with exporting).

done, thanks.
I created a new thread for my other issues: https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/move-my-socage.105855/