TrueNas ZFS Advice

Hi all,

New to the forum. Looking for some advice about ZFS.

I’m a freelance software developer and I’ve decided to do my first server build for my homelab environment.

I have a QNAP 8 bay NAS but unfortunately that failed a couple of months ago and QNAP have said as it’s over 5 years old they don’t make the parts to fix it anymore. It was fully populated with 6TB drives running in RAID6 and I was using about 23TB of the space. It’s all multimedia stuff for Plex and luckily the whole lot is backed up to my Dropbox business account.

I’ve purchased a Supermicro SSG-6029 16 bay 2U server and I plan to install Proxmox as the main OS on a SATA DOM. I plan run TrueNas Core in a VM.

As I understand it, RAIDZ is purely a software RAID. Is this correct? There are no hardware controllers for RAIDZ?

I plan to run RAID6/RAIDZ2. I had my fingers burned with RAID5 before which is why I switched to RAID6.

Does TrueNas actually support standard RAID or is it purely RAIDZ?

The whole ZFS stuff is new to me so I would appreciate any advice you could offer and things to watch out for and be aware of.

Thanks,

FS

TrueNAS works better and will be better if you pass the drives directly to the OS (freeBSD). Then you have some benefits, like migrating the whole pool to another server, sata connection order doesn’t matter , TrueNAS will still detect the pool.
ZFS file system is a freeBSD file system.

Before you decide virtualize TrueNAS, i will make a test: pass the drives to the virtual machine , build the pool, add data, and then see if you can import successfully on another TrueNAS server. If this fail, i will not virtualize if i was you.

Positive point of ZFS, is very strong on snapshots and can do ZFS Replication based on a snapshots. So you can backup the main storage pool to another pool, in the same server, or another server.

I’m planning to test some virtualization with Proxmox and XCP-NG, having external storage for VM’s and also for Data on external server TrueNAS with 10 Gbe connection.

check out this video:

Thanks.

It really needs to be virtualized for me as I plan to run a bunch of other virtual machines for other stuff. I will be making sure that IOMMU is enabled and set up so I can pass hardware directly to a virtual machine if that’s what you mean.

In a case like this you really want to do PCIe passthrough of the HBA that the drives attach to. This means the Proxmox won’t see the drives connected to the HBA at all and FreeNAS is given complete control over them.