PsychoWards

I'm using a RaidZ2 without any issues, but I'm also not using any of the apps, since I'm running an Ubuntu VM with docker for all my apps. I didn't follow all the discussions but it seems that destroying the first pool created results in apps become unusable until some paths/settings are fixed in TrueNas, but don't quote me on that, maybe someone else has more information about this. To add to @Mobius explanations about the Vdevs: Once you loose all the drives from 1 vdev you loose everything. Meaning with 3x2 drive vdevs you can only loose 1 drive per vdev (but 3 drives in total if they are all from different vdevs) and with 2x3 drive vdevs you can loose 2 drives per vdev without loosing any data. @L-Pif you have 10 gbit/s networking, you might want to look into adding an nvme cache drive as an L2ARC. ARC is a read only cache, which is keeping the files which you might need next in a cache in memory for quick access. You can extend this with an L2ARC cache which, stores additional files on a dedicated drive. If this drive is an SSD it's gonna ready and serve those files significantly faster then if Hexos needed to read them from the slow HDDs. This might make sense in your case if you have 10gbit/s networking, everything below and the speed benefits are likely to be marginal at best. And no there is no write cache in Hexos only a read cache. 🙂

Exactly and depending on your usecase it might be hit or miss, if the ARC is caching the wrong files. For most user's it's not really useful except if you absolutely need the faster read speed of an m.2 SSD or your are doing a lot of video/image editing. If you just use your NAS as a backup, media storage solution, the L2ARC is very likely not needed. It's possible that you were transfering a lot of small files earlier, which could explain the 30MB/s you saw earlier. The connection is always taking the shortest path, if your PC and Server are connected to the same switch, they will not pass through the router.

That does look like a proper setup =D Is everything connected to your UPS? Concerning your copying speed, can you try copying from and to another device, to see which system might be the issue? If you're not finding a conclusive answer, you can create another topic in the support forum to get some more help on this matter. There is no write cache in Truenas/Hexos there is only L2ARC. This is an extension of the ARC which is running in memory. The ARC is buffering files which truenas thinks you might use next, to have them ready in memory and not needing to ready it from the drives. The L2ARC is an extension and it's keeping more files on the cache drive. It is a read only cache.

There are SFP modules with an RJ45 connector with up to 10Gbit/s, you don't need to go to fibre yet. If you can't or don't want to use the SFP card, it might be worth to consider getting a 2.5 Gbit/s card instead of a 1Gb card, they are not that much more expensive and it avoids you the need to upgrade the NIC afterwards, especially since 2.5Gbit/s switches are no longer expensive.

Can you give os more details on your SFP Network cards? You might be able to reuse them and just get an SFP Module

Onboard SATA Ports should be the least of your concerns when choosing a Motherboard, since you can easily add more SATA ports with HBA PCIe cards. I agree with @Dylan use your current machine, add some RAM and get a feeling for everything and for your needs (especially VM and Docker stuff). Maybe you get into Machine Learning (face recognition in Immich, AI OCR in paperlessngx etc...) and you need a potent dedicated GPU or you are only running lightweight apps and you can continue using your current server for the years to come.

Can you even reinstall an already installed app? Does Hexos allow you to do this? Do you mean if an app was installed via Truenas and it becomes a Hexos curated App that it is prefilling all the fields based on the current installation or if the App was installed via Hexos and you want to reinstall or both?

The Synology NAS is going to life at my parents house once the initial backup was made, so even if the entire building burns down, I'll have a backup. (So yes, indeed planning for the worst case) I'm only backing up the important things, for the rest, snapshots need to be enough.

Once you figured out the best/optimal settings for your use case(s), could you possibly release a recommended/curated settings guide, I would be very interested in this. It probably will not be the optimal configuration for every single usecase but probably already a good baseline for most cases, especially since most Youtube videos concerning setting up Truenas recommend outdated and suboptimal settings.

I'm running an Ubuntu VM which is hosting all of my docker containers, it's running Hexos to do NAS things and I will migrate my Windows Server over to proxmox as well, the windows VM will only run when I need to do windows thingy things. (Mainly Gameservers)

I cannot exactly answer you what you can do in Truenas concerning Apps/VM, however there are 2 approaches which would likely fit your bill if you want to have 1 server running all your stuff. If NAS is your main purpose and you only need some Apps (Plex, Immich, Home Assistant, Bitwarden etc.) and don't need to run different VMs (some Linux Distro, Windows etc.) Hexos on bare metal should be your way to go. However if you want to have different VMs running (Ubuntu for Docker, a Windows Server for Minecraft, Opnsense and Hexos) in that case you should use Proxmox as your OS and install Hexos in a VM, because Hexos is mainly a NAS with hypervisor capabilities, if however you need to run multiple VMs Proxmox is your better choice as the OS.

So you would need at least the 8GB RasPi5 (85€), with a powersupply (10€). The RasplPi5 doesn't have SATA ports, so you already need a hat to get the sata ports, (60€). You really shouldn't run Truenas off of the microSD card, so you already need 1 SATA port for your boot drive(likely esata), which leaves you with 4 more ports for your data drives. But depending on your hat you are limited to 2.5'' drives With the costs for the Pi and Hat you are already at 155€ which puts you in the price range of N100 NAS boards, which gives you x86_64 support and more bang for your back and more features. Sure a RasPi5/ARM Nas is possible but I just don't see the use case if you can get better suited HW for around the same price. Rewriting Truenas/Hexos for ARM would cost a loooooot of money.

This is impossible to do with software alone, you need a dedicated meter, measuring what the server is pulling from the plug:

It sounds very much like your systems are just freezing up, can you confirm this by trying to interact with the server directly? Is the server still responding to keyboard inputs and is the display still showing anything? If the server is no longer responsive I would suggest to read through the suggestions in following topic and to post your specs and additional infos there. A lot of people are using Hexos/Truenas and very few have stability issues, this makes me believe that the issue is likely on the HW side rather then on OS side. Even if your PC/Server was running without freezes for years with another OS, doesn't necessarily mean that the system is 100% stabil, it might just never have reached the conditions where it freezes. Hexos using almost all of the Memory is likely a scenario which didn't occur before at least not for a prolonged amount of time. Are you using your XMP or DOCP profiles? Have you done any overclocking/volting? Are you using the latest BIOS version? Have you disable automatic overclocking which a lot of consumer grade boards are doing? Those are common culprits for instabilities in those kind of situations.

Hey @Luminous, What would be the intended HW which you would like to use and what would be your use case? Seeing how little interest/support/opportunity there is currently for an ARM based NAS I doubt this will be implemented in the foreseeable future unless there is some major shift in the PC HW space.

No, VPNs are generally considered one of the, if not the safest option to connect to your self hosted stuff. The Deck website will stay available in the future, the local deck will be added as an alternative and not as a replacement to the existing website.

I've made some progress, Immich is installed and up and running and currently using my PCs GPU for the ML stuff... My current plan is to get my old 2080Ti installed and working in the server itself. PaperlessNGX is now also running, which I use to store and archive all sorts of documents. I've made the Hexos Gods very angry at me, by create a single drive pool with an external USB drive, which I use as a replication task target of some of my datasets. Next on the list is getting rsync setup to my UNRAID and Synology NAS and at that point I think I should have enough backups of my most important files. I'll post some pictures once I get to install the GPU.

The 128GB ECC Memory would be a compelling argument for the server HW (but unfortunately the only compelling you, but a good one)

@Ioannis pretty much spot on, you would just select import pool instead of create pool in Truenas.

Schweizer Franken, not that uncommon of a currency 🙂

Hey @Ioannis I'm happy that I could help. 🙂 Concerning your storage usage, if you decide to look into Plex and to store your existing DVDs/Blurays as well you can quickly use up another 1-2TB, just worth a consideration. About the need for the windows machine, is there nothing similar which you can run in Docker which does the same thing? And last but not least, take your time, it's supposed to be a fun ride and not a stressful one.

Hey @Ioannis Hexos/Truenas is using ZFS and not normal RAID, meaning there is different wording and numbers involved in describing the different redundancy modes. ZFS Raids are called as fallowing: Stripe: similar to Raid0 (the Data is split across 2 drives, if 1 drive dies you lose everything) Mirrored: similar to Raid1 (the Data is mirrored on both drives you can loose 1 drive) RaidZ1: similar to Raid5 (you need at least 3 drives and can loose 1 drive without loosing data) RaidZ2: you can loose 2 drives without loosing data RaidZ3: you can loose 3 drives. As you see Raid1 and RaidZ1 are very different things and in this forum you will most likely only find the ZFS naming schema and I will use it in this post as well. Already today, during the installation, or afterwards in Truenas, you can create mirrored boot drives with 2 drives, this is supported out of the box and not difficult to setup at all. If you want to have the piece of mind just chuck in an additional 256GB NVME SSD in there and you are good to go. Just avoid HW Raid when using Truenas, let Truenas/ZFS take care of the Raid. Concerning your Networking, it appears that Realtek NICs are not supported, that might be why your motherboard ethernet port isn't working. If this is the case you can check if you can install a PCIe network card, an USB network card is not the optimal solution. If you only use 2 drives, Hexos will create a mirrored Pool which you cannot extend afterwards. Once you have a mirrored Pool you are stuck with 2 drives. You might want to consider adding a 3 drive now, to create a RaidZ1 Pool, have 12TB of usable storage and still have the ability to extend in the future (which you might not need, but it's worth considering since once you go with the mirrored pool you are stuck with it) Dual Boot with Windows, what is your use case? I suppose if it's your family NAS your family want to be uploading/browsing there images, or watch movies using plex all the time, they don't take it to kindly if they cannot watch their movies because you need to do sth. in Windows. I would suggest running Windows in a VM in Hexos/Truenas if this would be a valid approach. Concerning SSH into Linux/Truenas, you first need to enable ssh for your user/truenas admin, enable ssh itself and then you can use putty or the onboard windows terminal using: ssh truenas_admin@<Hexos-IP> And then enter your password and you are connected via SSH with the server.

It's not a backup, it's a mirror, meaning everything is stored on both drives at the same time and any change is written to both drives, there is never a delta between both drives. Meaning there is not a first/second drive, it's on both and any one drive can die (or unplug for that matter) and accept Truenas shouting vary angrily at you that 1 drive is missing, everything is still working as if nothing ever happened. You don't even need to do anything at this point, Truenas is handling everything automagically. Once you got a new replacement drive, you put it in, setup the mirror in Truenas/Hexos again and you got full redundancy again.

There is no dedicated admin interface, 2283 is the normal port which truenas seems to be mapping to 30041. To access the admin panel you click on the top right where your user icon is and from the pop up menu you can select Administration. This does not work in the App only in a browser. You are not supposed to do that, you should upload your photos via the app/gui.

I suppose you mean when your boot drive dies how do you recover your data from your data drives? As long as you have not lost more drives then your pool type can recover from, you can chuck the drives into any Truenas, Hexos (once pool import is supported) or any other OS supporting ZFS, import the pools (the ZFS information are all stored on the data drives) and you can access all your data from those drives.