App pool on boot drive?

[CheeryFlame]

Hello, I'm building a Mini ITX backup server for my main server and I was wondering if I could use the same drives that my boot-pool is on for my applications pool.

 

[sretalla]

There are ways to do that... not supported ways (you're on your own if anything breaks now or later with an update as the developers don't test/expect that scenario to exist).

HOWTO: Split SSD with boot-pool to create partition for data (no USB install, easy config migration)

Hello, while there already exist HOWTOs about "shrinking" boot-pool, e.g. HOWTO: Using a pair of large SSDs with boot and data pools for SCALE HOWTO: TrueNAS Scale: from 32gb USB to booting from mirrored larger enterprise SSD's, create add'l partition/data pool from remaining free space Credit...

www.truenas.com

 

[CheeryFlame]

There are ways to do that... not supported ways (you're on your own if anything breaks now or later with an update as the developers don't test/expect that scenario to exist).

HOWTO: Split SSD with boot-pool to create partition for data (no USB install, easy config migration)

Hello, while there already exist HOWTOs about "shrinking" boot-pool, e.g. HOWTO: Using a pair of large SSDs with boot and data pools for SCALE HOWTO: TrueNAS Scale: from 32gb USB to booting from mirrored larger enterprise SSD's, create add'l partition/data pool from remaining free space Credit...

www.truenas.com

Thank you for your answer. I'm not interested in pursuing this route if this is out of scope.

I have 2x M.2 slots and I wanted to use the second M.2 drive as a mirror drive for my boot pool.

For the applications I'll do a ZFS replication on the data pool.

As for the boot pool I'm wondering if I could use an USB stick as a mirrored boot device? I'm afraid I don't have much other choices left. The only other way I see this would be to get an HBA card in the PCI slot to free up the SATA ports on the motherboard and 3D print an SSD tray to mount somewhere in the case.

 

[sretalla]

The only other way I see this would be to get an HBA card in the PCI slot to free up the SATA ports on the motherboard and 3D print an SSD tray to mount somewhere in the case.

This would be the only "recommended" way.

You can run the gauntlet of USB stick boot, but it's much better if you use a portable USB SSD instead like the samsung T5 or T7 (available quite cheap where I am).

Mirroring boot devices is largely overrated IMO, usually just saves a little time in recovery, but not a lot other than that.

EDIT: but do back up your config somewhere that isn't on your NAS to make your life easier... using @joeschmuck 's report script is a great option for that (and generally a good thing to be running if you like your data). https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/multi_report-sh-version-for-core-and-scale.179/

 

[CheeryFlame]

This would be the only "recommended" way.

You can run the gauntlet of USB stick boot, but it's much better if you use a portable USB SSD instead like the samsung T5 or T7 (available quite cheap where I am).

Mirroring boot devices is largely overrated IMO, usually just saves a little time in recovery, but not a lot other than that.

EDIT: but do back up your config somewhere that isn't on your NAS to make your life easier... using @joeschmuck 's report script is a great option for that (and generally a good thing to be running if you like your data). https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/multi_report-sh-version-for-core-and-scale.179/

Yes you're right, I think that I'm thinking too much about this. I'll just replicate my apps to the main data pool and get my truenas config backed up daily with multi_report.

Thank you!

 

[CheeryFlame]

I was just wondering how bad it would be to have my app drive on the data drive? They're mechanic hard drives and could make an applications dataset on it. This way I could keep mirrored boot drives. At this time speaking this is only a machine to replicate my main TrueNAS server, I don't think I'd install many critical use app. The only thing that may happen is that I dedicated this machine to being my Plex Media Server and data backup of my main server as the Intel Quicksync is more heat friendly than my current Xeons.

 

[sretalla]

I was just wondering how bad it would be to have my app drive on the data drive? They're mechanic hard drives and could make an applications dataset on it. This way I could keep mirrored boot drives.

As I mentioned already, I'm not really a fan of mirroring boot, but do it if you want.

Most folks around here seem to end up complaining about their pool doing lots of little writes (which keep the drives spinning if they have settings to spin down) and makes noise... so there would be recommendations to move apps to a pool of SSDs to avoid that noise.

There's no reason at all that apps can't live on a pool of HDDs if that's wanted by the system owner.