I got an old server and it has a hardware raid card on it. I installed trueNAS on it. Shows 18tb raid right away (24tb 4tbx6). And it does not help that I’m new to this stuff.
Is hardware raid any good for truNAS? should I just get a pcie to sata and connect drives individually?
When I looked into this I found that, for TrueNAS, using ZFS with RAW disks is generally preferable.
I wound up writing custom firmware to my hardware RAID card so that it would be effectively “transparent” and yield direct hardware access to the disks.
TrueNAS is better when it sees raw disks and not HW raid. There are still useful parts in TrueNAS if you have a HW raid volume like file sharing, synchronization, apps (docker), etc. But the true power lies in zfs which needs raw disks.
So, it’s better if I get a normal pcie to sata card and connect them individually.
Then just raid them through software.
Also, what are your thoughts on second hand drives, and just monitoring them and replacing them as needed. (im currently saving up for good new 4tb x 6 drives lol)
With TrueNAS yes, a sata card connected to a bare drive is the preferred way. I have done it differently with enterprise hardware and virtualization but it’s not really supposed to be done that way. And ZFS is not technically “RAID” in the classic sense, but it does implement its own RAID‑like redundancy (RAIDZ and mirrors) as part of an integrated filesystem and volume manager. There are also things you can do with faster NVME drives like SLOG, L2ARC, and SPECIAL vdevs to store pool metadata. But some of these can fail and wipe out all your data if you aren’t careful. So read a lot.
Second hand drives are fine in my opinion as long as SMART is not reporting any immediate errors. Just assume you will have failures and have spares built into the zfs volume.
I’m not an expert by any stretch but I have been doing this for 10 plus years so I have some experience.
I got an old server and it has a hardware raid card on it. I installed trueNAS on it. Shows 18tb raid right away (24tb 4tbx6). And it does not help that I’m new to this stuff.
Is hardware raid any good for truNAS? should I just get a pcie to sata and connect drives individually?
or
When I looked into this I found that, for TrueNAS, using ZFS with RAW disks is generally preferable.
I wound up writing custom firmware to my hardware RAID card so that it would be effectively “transparent” and yield direct hardware access to the disks.
TrueNAS is better when it sees raw disks and not HW raid. There are still useful parts in TrueNAS if you have a HW raid volume like file sharing, synchronization, apps (docker), etc. But the true power lies in zfs which needs raw disks.
So, it’s better if I get a normal pcie to sata card and connect them individually. Then just raid them through software.
Also, what are your thoughts on second hand drives, and just monitoring them and replacing them as needed. (im currently saving up for good new 4tb x 6 drives lol)
With TrueNAS yes, a sata card connected to a bare drive is the preferred way. I have done it differently with enterprise hardware and virtualization but it’s not really supposed to be done that way. And ZFS is not technically “RAID” in the classic sense, but it does implement its own RAID‑like redundancy (RAIDZ and mirrors) as part of an integrated filesystem and volume manager. There are also things you can do with faster NVME drives like SLOG, L2ARC, and SPECIAL vdevs to store pool metadata. But some of these can fail and wipe out all your data if you aren’t careful. So read a lot.
Second hand drives are fine in my opinion as long as SMART is not reporting any immediate errors. Just assume you will have failures and have spares built into the zfs volume.
I’m not an expert by any stretch but I have been doing this for 10 plus years so I have some experience.