I got an old server and it has a hardware raid card on it. I installed trueNAS on it. Shows 18tb raid right away (24tb 4tbx6). And it does not help that I’m new to this stuff.
Is hardware raid any good for truNAS? should I just get a pcie to sata and connect drives individually?
When I looked into this I found that, for TrueNAS, using ZFS with RAW disks is generally preferable.
I wound up writing custom firmware to my hardware RAID card so that it would be effectively “transparent” and yield direct hardware access to the disks.
TrueNAS is better when it sees raw disks and not HW raid. There are still useful parts in TrueNAS if you have a HW raid volume like file sharing, synchronization, apps (docker), etc. But the true power lies in zfs which needs raw disks.
So, it’s better if I get a normal pcie to sata card and connect them individually.
Then just raid them through software.
Also, what are your thoughts on second hand drives, and just monitoring them and replacing them as needed. (im currently saving up for good new 4tb x 6 drives lol)
With TrueNAS yes, a sata card connected to a bare drive is the preferred way. I have done it differently with enterprise hardware and virtualization but it’s not really supposed to be done that way. And ZFS is not technically “RAID” in the classic sense, but it does implement its own RAID‑like redundancy (RAIDZ and mirrors) as part of an integrated filesystem and volume manager. There are also things you can do with faster NVME drives like SLOG, L2ARC, and SPECIAL vdevs to store pool metadata. But some of these can fail and wipe out all your data if you aren’t careful. So read a lot.
Second hand drives are fine in my opinion as long as SMART is not reporting any immediate errors. Just assume you will have failures and have spares built into the zfs volume.
I’m not an expert by any stretch but I have been doing this for 10 plus years so I have some experience.
Interesting, thanks.
If you no expert, the I’m a newbie lol.
I will try a sata card and raiding them through software.
What would you recommend for 6x4tb ?
I know there are raids and mirrors, I was thinking like raid 5 but still unsure. I also have a icydock for 2.5 in drives that I can raid separately with ssds when I have the funds.
What is your experience with raids and safest bet on old hardware, if running 24/7 with important data?
I would think that right now the sweet spot for good used drives is between 4-8tb. Check out backblaze’s drive stats for some good info about failure rates for older drives.
Yeah RAID 5 is fine (in ZFS terms it’s just called raidz or raidz1). You could also do something like raidz2 (which is essentially RAID6 with two parity drives). There is some newer stuff in TrueNAS called dRAID which does some interesting stuff with the spares. It’s kinda like old RAID5EE stuff if youre familiar with that. Just google it and read up on it.
Safest bet on old hardware… in my opinion find some old enterprise level stuff somebody is upgrading out of. I get lots of hand-me-downs that way. This stuff is meant to run 24/7, keep running forever, and is usually upgraded before it’s really not useful to anyone. Word of warning, this stuff is generally not power efficient, or quiet for that matter. So I wouldn’t be running this in my bedroom. Well unless you’re cold 'cause your heater is broken and love lots of white noise :)
As a hardware guy going on 20+ years let me offer some basic advice. If this data is important , which you mentioned it was, RAID is NOT backup. Have separate backups. Yes I know it’s expensive but hardware can and does fail. Sometimes irrecoverably. ZFS does a good job helping with this with snapshots and the ability to sync easily. For me just I follow the 3-2-1 rules. Yeah it’s kinda outdated but I’m old.
The 3-2-1 rule is basically:
3 copies
Primary data (on its own pool).
Local backup (on a separate ZFS pool, ideally on different hardware). This is where ZFS replication is useful. This built into TrueNAS.
Off‑site/cloud backup (replicated ZFS dataset or traditional backup tool like restic/Borg to cloud).
2 different media
e.g., Primary on SSDs, backup on HDDs; or primary on local NAS, backup in cloud.
1 off‑site
Replicate ZFS snapshots to a remote location (another site or cloud).
Oh and one other thing. If you are using TrueNAS be mindful there are two flavors now, TrueNAS Core and TrueNAS Scale. The interfaces are slightly different but the main differences are:
TrueNAS Core is based on FreeBSD and is the older, more mature “classic NAS” platform, optimized for rock‑solid file serving with jails and VMs.
TrueNAS Scale is based on Debian Linux and is designed for “scale‑out” and hyperconverged use: clustering, containers, and modern virtualization on newer hardware.
Seems like seagate 4-8tb is the sweet spot.
Is there any difference in the models of the segate drives? Or just the iron wolf NAS are the better choice?
Also, currently can fund all ssds for primary and I’m not that interested in read speeds. I’m more interested in a safe space for files to get stored in without fear of loss.
I have a old tell server tower, running truenas scale. Once I get a pcie sata card I will set up with raid5.
And zfs is just a backup of the raid, like a sync?
And then I think my move would be to get 6 Seagate drives lol
I got an old server and it has a hardware raid card on it. I installed trueNAS on it. Shows 18tb raid right away (24tb 4tbx6). And it does not help that I’m new to this stuff.
Is hardware raid any good for truNAS? should I just get a pcie to sata and connect drives individually?
or
When I looked into this I found that, for TrueNAS, using ZFS with RAW disks is generally preferable.
I wound up writing custom firmware to my hardware RAID card so that it would be effectively “transparent” and yield direct hardware access to the disks.
TrueNAS is better when it sees raw disks and not HW raid. There are still useful parts in TrueNAS if you have a HW raid volume like file sharing, synchronization, apps (docker), etc. But the true power lies in zfs which needs raw disks.
So, it’s better if I get a normal pcie to sata card and connect them individually. Then just raid them through software.
Also, what are your thoughts on second hand drives, and just monitoring them and replacing them as needed. (im currently saving up for good new 4tb x 6 drives lol)
With TrueNAS yes, a sata card connected to a bare drive is the preferred way. I have done it differently with enterprise hardware and virtualization but it’s not really supposed to be done that way. And ZFS is not technically “RAID” in the classic sense, but it does implement its own RAID‑like redundancy (RAIDZ and mirrors) as part of an integrated filesystem and volume manager. There are also things you can do with faster NVME drives like SLOG, L2ARC, and SPECIAL vdevs to store pool metadata. But some of these can fail and wipe out all your data if you aren’t careful. So read a lot.
Second hand drives are fine in my opinion as long as SMART is not reporting any immediate errors. Just assume you will have failures and have spares built into the zfs volume.
I’m not an expert by any stretch but I have been doing this for 10 plus years so I have some experience.
Interesting, thanks. If you no expert, the I’m a newbie lol.
I will try a sata card and raiding them through software. What would you recommend for 6x4tb ? I know there are raids and mirrors, I was thinking like raid 5 but still unsure. I also have a icydock for 2.5 in drives that I can raid separately with ssds when I have the funds.
What is your experience with raids and safest bet on old hardware, if running 24/7 with important data?
I would think that right now the sweet spot for good used drives is between 4-8tb. Check out backblaze’s drive stats for some good info about failure rates for older drives.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/category/cloud-storage/hard-drive-stats/
Yeah RAID 5 is fine (in ZFS terms it’s just called raidz or raidz1). You could also do something like raidz2 (which is essentially RAID6 with two parity drives). There is some newer stuff in TrueNAS called dRAID which does some interesting stuff with the spares. It’s kinda like old RAID5EE stuff if youre familiar with that. Just google it and read up on it.
Safest bet on old hardware… in my opinion find some old enterprise level stuff somebody is upgrading out of. I get lots of hand-me-downs that way. This stuff is meant to run 24/7, keep running forever, and is usually upgraded before it’s really not useful to anyone. Word of warning, this stuff is generally not power efficient, or quiet for that matter. So I wouldn’t be running this in my bedroom. Well unless you’re cold 'cause your heater is broken and love lots of white noise :)
As a hardware guy going on 20+ years let me offer some basic advice. If this data is important , which you mentioned it was, RAID is NOT backup. Have separate backups. Yes I know it’s expensive but hardware can and does fail. Sometimes irrecoverably. ZFS does a good job helping with this with snapshots and the ability to sync easily. For me just I follow the 3-2-1 rules. Yeah it’s kinda outdated but I’m old.
The 3-2-1 rule is basically:
3 copies
2 different media
1 off‑site
Oh and one other thing. If you are using TrueNAS be mindful there are two flavors now, TrueNAS Core and TrueNAS Scale. The interfaces are slightly different but the main differences are:
TrueNAS Core is based on FreeBSD and is the older, more mature “classic NAS” platform, optimized for rock‑solid file serving with jails and VMs.
TrueNAS Scale is based on Debian Linux and is designed for “scale‑out” and hyperconverged use: clustering, containers, and modern virtualization on newer hardware.
Hope this is useful….
Very informative thanks!
Seems like seagate 4-8tb is the sweet spot. Is there any difference in the models of the segate drives? Or just the iron wolf NAS are the better choice?
Also, currently can fund all ssds for primary and I’m not that interested in read speeds. I’m more interested in a safe space for files to get stored in without fear of loss.
I have a old tell server tower, running truenas scale. Once I get a pcie sata card I will set up with raid5.
And zfs is just a backup of the raid, like a sync?
And then I think my move would be to get 6 Seagate drives lol