I’ve recently been looking at options to upgrade (completely replace) my current NAS, as it’s currently more than a little bit jank and frankly kinda garbage. I have a few questions about that and about migrating my current TrueNAS scale installation or at least it’s settings over.

Q1: Does the physical order of the drives matter? I.E. The order they are plugged into the SATA ports.

Q2: Since I have TrueNAS scale installed on a USB flash drive (yeah, ik you’re not supposed to but it is what it is), how bad of an idea would it be to just… unplug it from my current NAS and plug it into the new one?

Q3: If all else fails, how reliable is TrueNAS scale’s importing of ZFS Pools and are there any gotchas with it?

Q4: Would moving to a virtualized solution like proxmox and installing TrueNAS scale on top of that in a VM make more sense on a beefier server?

E: Thank you all for the replies, the migration went smoothly :)

  • @xyguyEnglish
    1•28 days ago

    1. The order doesnt matter as long as they are the same drives, you dont have a usb dock or raid card in front of them (ie sata/sas/nvme only)and you have enough of them to rebuild the array. Ideally all of them but in a dire situation you can rebuild based on 2 out of 3 of a Raid Z1

    2. You can do that, you shouldn’t but you can. I’ve done something similar before in a nasty recovery situation and it worked but don’t do it unless you have no other option. I highly recommend just downloading the config file from your current truenas box and importing it into a fresh install on a proper drive on your new machine.

    3. Sort of already mentioned it but you can take your drives, plug them into your new machine. Install a fresh Truenas scale and then just import the config file from your current setup and you should be off to the races. Your main gotcha is if the pool is encrypted. If you lose access to the key you are donezo forever. If not, the import has always been pretty straightforward and ive never had any issues with it.

    4. Lots of people virtualize truenas and lots of people virtualize firewalls too. To me, the ungodly amount of stupid edge cases, especially with consumer hardware that break hardware passthrough on disks (which truenas/zfs needs to work properly) is never worth it.