Fixing my worst TrueNAS Scale mistake!

In this video, I'll fix my worst mistake I made on my TrueNAS Scale Storage Server. We also talk about RAID-Z layouts, fault tolerance and ZFS performance. And what I've changed to make this server more robust and solid! #truenasscale #homelab #nas

Follow me:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
01:32 - Advertisement-*
02:17 - What was my set-up before?
06:58 - My new set-up 2x RAID-Z2
08:15 - New storage pool with SSDs

________________
All links with "*" are affiliate links.

[TrueNAS]

It happens to the best of us! Glad you were able to get that sorted out, Christian!

[borealis]

Good on you for coming clean and sorting that mess out.

[petersimmons]

Thanks for being honest and introspective about mistakes. We all make them and sometimes we learn the most from them. Hopefully they don’t cost us too much in the process. Great series.

[snowballeffects]

There's no better way than learning from the mistakes of other's ahead of having to make them yourself - Thank you - Brilliant as always!

[nixxblikka]

I like the exceptional production quality of your videos - one of the view channels where my displays can show what they can - and yeah the content is also helpful!

[jonmayer]

I made the screengrab! I'm glad you are taking the steps to improve your setup. I must have 2nd, 3rd, and 4th guessed my setup before I deployed it.

[dastiffmeister]

Great video, Christian. I respect the humility. :)

I will allow myself to nitpick:
If you truly want to guard yourself against potential data loss when using identical and new SSDs in a vdev, if I am not mistaken it's best practice to write to (in your case) two drives (one from each separate vdev) before the creation of the 2x2 striped mirror pool so that all four SSDs do not potentially fail simultaneously.
But that would be taking it to an entirely new level of preparation ^^

[Sevbh]

Hi Christian

Thank you for the great video. I've been learning a lot from you! It would be great to see a video on automatic backup solutions that are out there. I am currently building a NAS with the main goal of automating backups of my production servers, but not sure where to start or what the best practices are. Thank you so much! Keep well.

[alex.prodigy]

awesome, these videos are the best ... explaining what went wrong and how it was mitigated
thanks!

[cdm]

great video, I request to make an updated step-by-step video on the TrueNas Setup, including all this 🙂

[abansalify]

if you add an SSD with HDD in a Pool, ZFS can use a portion of SSD to convert the HDD into a hybrid drive which means, your IO speed goes up.

[BC]

6:48 just to add: The recovery process is not only a critical time if you have no additional fault tolerance because of the time it takes, but also because of the extra strain it puts on your hard drive as during reconstruction when you literally read every single bit on that drive.
Add read fails on top which happen on average for 1 bit in every 12 TB and you know that you're playing with fire.

[ianpogi]

Thank you for all your vidoes! How's the health of your SSD's?

[spectreofspace]

Keep an eye on your SSD health. ZFS can eat cheap consumer SSDs in no time if you do a lot of writes on them. Forums generally recommend enterprise grade SSDs when used with ZFS. I had a 128GB Kingston I was using as an L2ARC. In 6 months it's health had already dropped to around 70%.

[TradersTradingEdge]

Awesome Christian. Highly respecting you!
There are not many Youtubers who confess making a mistakes in their domain. And I also learned more about the ZFS, because I also experiment with a 6TB TNS Server §8-)
So, keep it up, your doing great.
Cheers 👊

[MrBlackCracker]

man im glad i found your video. this is almost the EXACT setup i have running. with 12x 4tb drives. i dont mind sacrificing 33% because the security is deff worth it, but full mirroring just felt overkill. in fact, despite me skipping directly to the part i needed, im going to go ahead and rewatch the full video to make sure i didnt miss anything. maybe you had a mistake i can learn from

[lawrencerubanka]

Thanks for the very clear explanations. I'd love to see your take on backup and recovery of ZFS pools. That would make a good video. I suspect the backup topic would elicit plenty of critical feedback as well. :)

[BrianSez]

Great video. For the future video mentioned, could you discuss how to revert from the single VDEV to two VDEVs without compromising existing data? Also, I'd love to hear about your backup solution.

[AdenMocca]

Good video - glad that Scale is getting a lot of attention. TrueNAS is a great product to help experienced - but not ZFS developers - get going with a really good solution. The next step for good back up is to actually create a back up which means move the data to a different system. It's expensive at your size, but running a ZFS send / receive - or in TrueNAS a ZFS replication is important for real enterprise backup. RAID is not a back up, just a way to enhance availability. For important data you could also consider Backblaze or another solution.

[systemofapwne]

While having a dedicated VM pool on SSDs is absolutely nice, as an intermediate step, you could have added a L2ARC and SLOG device to your main pool and run the VMs from there. For syncronous IOPS, the SLOG devices is a huge deal (eg for databases) and the L2ARC (especially when marked persistent) will make your VMs feel snappier when reading from their respective disks. In principle, adding more RAM also helps by a lot, but the persistent L2ARC is especially helpful, when you reboot TrueNAS and then want to spin up your VMs: ARC in RAM is then not yet populated but L2ARC was, giving you SSD IOPS instead of HDD.