December 3, 20241 yr Good day. I built a home server a few months ago and decided to go for TrueNAS with two 8 TB harddisks. They were initially configured with mirror raid. Now that i need more storage, i was going to migrate to raidz1 (raid 5), but it turns out SMR harddisks is not recommended. This is due to TrueNAS using ZFS. After some research, unraid is a possible solution for all this. I was wondering if someone can tell me if this is going to work fine with Unraid, here are my use cases: Download and store movies and tv series, primarily. I also store some libre office files on a seperate share, it is critical that these files are not corrupted/lost. my requirements: I need to have a big amount of storage to store movies and tv shows. When/if i move to unraid, i will have 4 harddisks, and i should be able to at any point just add more harddisks to increase the unraid disk pool/array. If a harddisk fails, all i need to do is to purchase a new one and insert it and it will replicate the data from the other harddisks to the new one. I'm thinking a 1-hdd loss is enough. It needs to be compatible with SMR harddisks, so that i wont bump into problems down the line. I'm sure this is possible, but easily deploy SMB shares within unraid. Migrating from TrueNAS. I've been using TrueNAS ever since i got the harddrives, and i used 3.5 TB of data. These are mostly movies and tv shows i want to move over to unraid. I would assume i would just wipe the drives, so i can get the unraid pool created with its proper file system and raid configuration. Once complete, i would just import the data from a harddrive with all the data. Is this accurate? There was a whole discussion about this over at the TrueNAS forums.
December 3, 20241 yr 41 minutes ago, kriss0706 said: compatible with SMR harddisks Parity will be better with CMR but SMR for array data disks is OK.
December 3, 20241 yr Author 57 minutes ago, trurl said: Parity will be better with CMR but SMR for array data disks is OK. With TrueNAS there was a small chances of files going missing/corrupt, i got the impression that this wouldn't be the case of Unraid. As long as i won't lose any data with SMR on Unraid i am happy with that.
December 3, 20241 yr Get a CMR disk for parity and keep the SMR disks as data. I've had 1 8TB SMR for years as data and it's been fine and doesn't seem to have any performance impact, but it seldomly gets written to.
December 3, 20241 yr Community Expert 5 hours ago, kriss0706 said: i got the impression that this wouldn't be the case of Unraid Correct, that should never be an issue if they are used in the array.
December 3, 20241 yr Community Expert 8 hours ago, kriss0706 said: With TrueNAS there was a small chances of files going missing/corrupt, i got the impression that this wouldn't be the case of Unraid. As long as i won't lose any data with SMR on Unraid i am happy with that. Still worth pointing out that for important files you cannot afford to lose should have a backup strategy that keeps copies of such files off the server. This is sound strategy regardless of the types of disks used.
December 3, 20241 yr Author 9 hours ago, foo_fighter said: Get a CMR disk for parity and keep the SMR disks as data. I've had 1 8TB SMR for years as data and it's been fine and doesn't seem to have any performance impact, but it seldomly gets written to. Currently getting a CMR harddisk is out of the picture, but i suppose that can be done down the line. I was planning on just using a 250 GB SSD as a cache disk, hopefully this could make things a bit smoother. 7 hours ago, JorgeB said: Correct, that should never be an issue if they are used in the array. This is great to hear. So far i think Unraid is exactly what im looking for. 4 hours ago, itimpi said: Still worth pointing out that for important files you cannot afford to lose should have a backup strategy that keeps copies of such files off the server. This is sound strategy regardless of the types of disks used. Yeah, that is a good ppint. I will just move libre office files over to my WD NAS instead. These are all great responses. I think i should have it all covered. 14 hours ago, kriss0706 said: Migrating from TrueNAS. I've been using TrueNAS ever since i got the harddrives, and i used 3.5 TB of data. These are mostly movies and tv shows i want to move over to unraid. I would assume i would just wipe the drives, so i can get the unraid pool created with its proper file system and raid configuration. Once complete, i would just import the data from a harddrive with all the data. Is this accurate? Can someone confirm that this is the case in terms of a migration from TrueNAS to Unraid? I've never used Unraid before, and TrueNAS is also relatively new to me.
December 3, 20241 yr Community Expert 31 minutes ago, kriss0706 said: Can someone confirm that this is the case in terms of a migration from TrueNAS to Unraid? It will depend on which TrueNAS released the pool was created, post the output from: zpool status -LP
December 3, 20241 yr Author 15 minutes ago, JorgeB said: It will depend on which TrueNAS released the pool was created, post the output from: zpool status -LP Sure, here's a pastebin.
December 3, 20241 yr Community Expert It's not showing the partitions, I think because it's an older release on FreeBSD, not Scale on Linux, post output of: gpart show But most likely it will be using swap partitions.
December 3, 20241 yr Author 3 minutes ago, JorgeB said: It's not showing the partitions, I think because it's an older release on FreeBSD, not Scale on Linux, post output of: gpart show But most likely it will be using swap partitions. Another pastebin: gpart show
December 3, 20241 yr Community Expert Solution freebsd-swap (2.0G) Yep, the pool cannot be automatically imported for now, it should be possible in the near future, for now, you would need to manually remove the swap partitions: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/153274-how-to-non-irreversibly-migrate-from-truenas-core-with-zfs-to-unraid/?do=findComment&comment=1369139 Note that doing this does not prevent you from going back to TrueNAS (Core or Scale) later if you like.
December 3, 20241 yr Author 5 minutes ago, JorgeB said: it should be possible in the near future Is there an estimate for when this feature should be available? I could simply postpone this migration until that is in order. I would much rather have unraid handle this process. My current setup with TrueNAS "works", i just can't add more harddisks to my truenas pool.
December 3, 20241 yr Community Expert 11 minutes ago, kriss0706 said: Is there an estimate for when this feature should be available? Should be soon, but don't know of an ETA.
December 3, 20241 yr Author 1 minute ago, JorgeB said: Should be soon, but don't know of an ETA. Alright thanks anyway.
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.