Re: [gentoo-user] NAS and replacing with larger drives

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Am Thu, Dec 15, 2022 at 10:08:02PM -0600 schrieb Dale:

> I have a couple questions.  I currently have the NAS thingy on a older
> Dell machine.  It has a 4 core CPU and 8GBs of ram so it is acceptable,
> for the time being at least.  Bad thing is, only two drive bays.  :/  I
> have a few questions that I can't quite find answers to with google. 
>
> 1:  I have the OS on a USB stick.  From what I've read, they do fail due
> to wear at some point.

OTOH, TrueNAS is designed to run from it, so I would assume it handles its
root drive with care. Perhaps you can disable verbose logging and such.

> If I reinstall TrueNAS on a new USB stick, will it automatically see the
> previous pools and such or do I have to set everything up again fresh?

Pools and their metadata are stored inside the pools. In Linux, you don’t
even need to set up fstab. The pool stores its mount point internally. So
you just start the zfs daemon and it does everything magically.

> In other words, will I lose data?

You won’t lose data, of course. But I think you meant settings(?). Probably
about users, shares and such. Perhaps it has an export feature which can be
run periodically.

> This also includes if it is encrypted.

Encryption is a built-in ZFS feature. So yes, it will remember that. Not
sure about the decryption process (keyfile).

> 2:  Hardware change.  The Dell comes with a 100MB network card.  I
> ordered a 1GB card.  I plan to put it in when it gets here.  Will it see
> the new card and work automatically or will it take some work to get the
> network going?

I assume the kernel is built like many general-purpose-distros: with
everything in it you may need for the purpose. But since it is BSD, it may
have driver issues (availability and stability for certain cards).
Sometimes, when I read news about a new product, people complain that the
NIC is not Intel and will thus cause problems with BSD, especially with
niche stuff like the Killer-brand ethernet cards.

> and recompile.  I'm not sure about BSD tho.  Since it is sort of a
> binary thing, does TrueNAS handle hardware changes such as a network
> card well? 

I don’t see a connection between being a “binary thing” and hardware change.
Your gentoo is also a binary thing once it is compiled. ;-)

> I also found out something power wise.  The Dell when booted and sitting
> idle consumes about 120 watts monitor and all.

I figured as much when you mentioned its 100 Mbps card. It must be old then,
and back then, idle power was a non-issue.

> My main rig consumes just under 200 watts.  Not to bad

That’s a very lot for my taste. With a lower mid-range GPU (110 W Radeon R7
370) and one spinning rust, my 8-year-old PC used to idle at 50 W. Without
the HDD and with Intel graphics it is now at 27 W. Still not a good number
when compared with today’s hardware.

> but a Raspberry Pi would likely consume 15, 20 watts max according to what
> I've read.

My 3B idles at 5 W tops, I think. It cannot be much more under load since it
comes without a built-in heat spreader.

> Given the number of hard drives, it could pull 25 or 30 watts max but
> doubtful it would get that high.  I'm looking at 4 bays but also found a 6
> bay.  I think 6 is overkill tho. 

My four-bay NAS has four 6 TB drives and it draws around 50 W at idle. But
that’s because it is a server board, incuding IPMI chip (and—interestingly—
an internal USB-A for an OS stick). And it’s Haswell generation, so almost a
decade old design. For this reason I switch it on only every few weeks or
even months and only keep it running for a short time.

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