I have built a NAS for Truenas Scale. But I have a problem that it’s not stable.
I don’t know if it’s a hardware issue or a software issue (or a combination).
The most common problem is that the web-ui stops working, most often it’s for good (or at least longer than I’m willing to wait to see if it’ll work again), once it started working again after a couple of hours.
Once everything froze, but most times I’m able to ssh into it and SMB continues working.
The hardware I have is:
Node 804 Case with original 3 fans
1 extra fan (quiet, low speed, cheap)
Ryzen 5 3600 with original cooler (second hand)
AsRock Rack X470D4U (second hand)
2x RAM Kingston D4 2666 16GB ECC (KSM26ED8/16MR)
6x Toshiba MG08ACA16TE / 16 TB (In Raid-Z2)
Seasonic Focus GX 650W
1x WD Blue SN570 1TB (Single drive pool. Has VM’s and ix-applications)
1x Kingston Kingston A400 256GB (Boot drive; Second hand; Has 3 times the rated TBW written to it; No S.M.A.R.T. errors)
I would have switched to Truenas (non-scale) if that was possible, but I have the data already on the ZFS pool.
There is no problem in moving the pool. As long as Scale doesn’t add any fancy new ZFS features TrueNAS Core doesn’t have, you can just install Core on your boot drive and it should automatically import the pool. ZFS is quite mobile and pool import is surprisingly automatic. My own pool moved from TrueNAS to Proxmox and back to TrueNAS twice.
If you are unsure, put Core on a USB drive, boot from USB and check if pool import works. Then you can safely remove Scale and install Core on the proper boot drive.
This usually happens when the boot drive cannot write system logs, it locks up the UI but the system keeps trucking.
Check the cables and if you still have an issue, backup and install on a new boot drive. You only need a small drive so you could get a new one for a few $$.
Thank you for you reply! I thought all ZFS flags was set automatically, thus not allowing for a Pool from Scale to work in Core. I’ll have to test, if I can’t get it stable :).
If you import the pool to a newer pool version that has exclusive features, you have to manually upgrade the pool version and confirm it, but everything will work without upgrading. I don’t think this is the case as I’ve done migrations a couple of times and everything popped up immediately ready to go.
Have you done the migration from Scale to Core? Since I created the pool in Scale it could have had flags set during creation that might not be available in the BSD implementation of zfs, I think?
Everything on the pool incl. dataset properties stay the same, but you of course lose TrueNAS config like periodic tasks and network config.
Scale isn’t really production-ready and still more a beta. Even iXSystems doesn’t recommend Scale for the Enterprise yet. I went back from Scale to Core and the bugs I encountered haven’t been fixed until today…they are known for over a year now. Core is tried and trusted and the reason why TrueNAS got so successful, Scale is a disappointment really.
The pool is ZFS. And ZFS is designed to be migrated to other ZFS machines. As long as the server runs ZFS, you can import the pool. I had my Ubuntu Laptop pool exported and imported in Proxmox and Core…it’s plug and play.
New pool flags used are the only exception because you can’t e.g read from an encrypted pool if the ZFS version is so old that it doesn’t know anything about encryption. For typical homelab stuff and not migrating to 5 year old ZFS version, this can basically be ignored.
Just don’t forget to set up tuning parameters and scrub/snapshot/replication tasks on the new system
In Core you can actually set tuning parameters in the GUI and they persist through reboots. I never understood why iX removed this very important part from Scale and made it extra hard to change things.
Thank you for the help! I switched to a M.2 nvme ssd and reinstalled TrueNAS Scale, it seams much better now. I haven’t used it for more that a couple of days so far but have not had a full lockup of the webui, only a ~30 seconds wait for the login page to load some times.
In the near future I’d also like to try one of my X470D4U units with TrueNAS Scale.
Just to be sure:
Since you’re using a Zen 2 Ryzen there shouldn’t be an issue going to the latest BIOS version, that’s currently version 4.28 and the latest BMC/IPMI firmware version is 3.04.04:
ASRock Rack is unreliable updating their public websites regarding BIOS and firmware releases, many users have to fend for themselves…
For reference:
I’ve been testing mine with that updates with Windows 10, a 3700X, 4 x 16 GB ECC and various NVMe and SATA SSDs and so far absolutely no stability issues.
If that’s different with TrueNAS Scale I should be able to complain soon enough
