My World Book II Drives in TrueNAS

[sashdo]

Newbie so be gentle!

I have a WD My World Book II (Blue Rings) that has fallen over yet again so I think it is about time I ventured into TrueNAS as I have fixed it too many times now and have an old tower I can repurpose. The old NAS was set up with 2 x 1Tb drives in Raid 1 (mirror) and my question is can I bring them both into TrueNAS by simply mounting them or will I have to mount one then copy data over to a TrueNAS ZFS formatted drive that has been set up to do the mirroring or some other form of data protection method? What is the smoothest method to bring my mirrored data into TrueNAS based on the experience of the community? There are a lot of family photos on the drives so I really do not want to lose any data in the move which I why I came here first rather than charging straight on with a build.

My second question is, will the user access rights that were implemented on the WD box be compatible inside TrueNAS? I had four different users with different access rights to four separate folders on the drive. Will TrueNAS simply see all the folders and I can then set up new users inside TrueNAS to handle the access policies I want? Will I need to create the same users inside TrueNAS to get it to read the folders?

Once the WD NAS has been brought in I will then be looking to expand the system to grow with the requirements and needs we have, my main requirements are to have a place to put family photos and have them backed up.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Davvo]

Welcome! I suggest you reading the following resources:

Introduction to ZFS

This is a short introduction to ZFS. It is really only intended to convey the bare minimum knowledge needed to start diving into ZFS and is in no way meant to cut Michael W. Lucas' and Allan Jude's book income. It is a bit of a spiritual...

www.truenas.com

What's all the noise about HBA's, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

This is relevant to FreeNAS and TrueNAS CORE. Some parts of it might also be relevant to Scale, but I don't really know how reliable the Linux drivers are. 1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with...

www.truenas.com

Multiply your problems with SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. In the last year or two, we’ve had a resurgence of users asking about SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers. Please, do NOT use...

www.truenas.com

Is my Realtek ethernet really that bad?

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. One of the longest running issues faced here in the forums may be people who come to these forums, wanting to recycle an old PC into a NAS...

www.truenas.com

Hardware Recommendations Guide

This is the latest edition of the FreeNAS Community hardware recommendations guide. The current major version is R2, dated January 2021, with the last minor update on 2021-01-24. The format has moved away from the forum post form factor, to...

www.truenas.com

Do note that TrueNAS (either CORE or SCALE) requires at least 16GB of RAM in order to properly work.

The old NAS was set up with 2 x 1Tb drives in Raid 1 (mirror) and my question is can I bring them both into TrueNAS by simply mounting them or will I have to mount one then copy data over to a TrueNAS ZFS formatted drive that has been set up to do the mirroring or some other form of data protection method? What is the smoothest method to bring my mirrored data into TrueNAS based on the experience of the community?

In theory TrueNAS supports the import of NTFS disks... it has however been proven to be a bit of a random roulette.
The best way to port your data over should be to buy new disks, set up the SMB share and then copy the files over the LAN from another machine.

My second question is, will the user access rights that were implemented on the WD box be compatible inside TrueNAS? I had four different users with different access rights to four separate folders on the drive. Will TrueNAS simply see all the folders and I can then set up new users inside TrueNAS to handle the access policies I want? Will I need to create the same users inside TrueNAS to get it to read the folders?

You will probably need (and want) to set everything from ground zero in order to get the smoothest experience; the good news is that you should be able to perfectly recreate your old configuration permission-wise, you will probably just need to play a bit with the datasets and their ACLs.

 

[Bikerchris]

Welcome @sashdo !

I'm very much a junior, but do follow @Davvo 's advice. On top of that I would suggest:

• Look at the above comments by @Davvo again.
• If you have a spare machine that does not possess a Realtek NIC, most of us have a few hard drives hanging around and perhaps an SSD.
• Install TrueNAS Core on the SSD
• Access the GUI and create some users and/or groups
• create a mirror (not the most space efficient arrangement, might at least want to consider a 3 drive RAIDZ1)
• Create 4 datasets (a 'bit' like folders) with the appropriate user access rights
• See how you get on.

If you get on fantastically, you might consider using the machine you've configured and use it as a snapshot/replication receiver.

When it comes to expanding the storage capacity, you have to think further in advance than you may do with other systems. However one simple method is to replace each drive with a drive of greater capacity. So for instance, you may start with 3 x 1TB drives and when needed, gradually replace them with 3TB drives.

I hope that helps, very best of luck.