So this is very weird, I have a very new to me (used) FreeNAS setup from ebay (another member here bought the same thing). It came with 9 drives and has 12 capacity. I took from my old FreeNAS setup 3 drives to make for a full 12 drive setup.
I’ve now booted it up and clicking storage, Volumes, there are /mnt/ZFS my old volumes (Backup, TVShows, movies, reolink etc).
I thought it was hard enough to swap disks in FreeNAS, but wow, just wow, amazing.
I’m in disbelief I threw in an odd match of Z1 disks to a bunch of ‘fresh’ disks and FreeNAS recovered the volumes (granted its listed a degraded). I really didn’t give FreeNAS that much credit.
Update to mine, I swapped out three 2tb drives because of unreadable sectors. One is from the eBay vendor (actually the worst one, it shows as 0tb in the GUI) so I contacted them.
Currently moving my backed up data to a pool/smb and I don’t have fancy 10+g networking at home… It’s going to take days lol
Sometimes the monitoring services just die randomly, sometimes the network shits the bed. It needs a reboot about once a month it seems. Could be my hardware. Just an old haswell box I had laying around. Its far from the ideal freenas setup.
Talked about the good, now the bad (and its not FreeNAS, its me…), zpools, datasets, shares, its just not intuitive and the GUI doesn’t help. Every time I want to setup storage, I need to re-watch a few youtube videos that go over “the basics” so that its setup right with the right permissions. IMO it just doesn’t have to be this difficult.
I know I know, its being knit picky, better that the nuts and bolts work well and the GUI is meh vs. great GUI but you loose data to bad underlying file system.
Soon I will finally dable with iSCSI on FreeNAS to serve space for VMware VMs on another host- over 1G… this will be interesting. I see expensive networking gear in my future.