Running TrueNAS on a QNAP TS-453Be with NVME drives on an accessory card

[tre4B]

I decided I wanted to try TrueNAS on my QNAP as it better fits my ethos and needs plus it looks awesome. I thought I had the idea of how to make it work, booted on the USB drive did the install which seemed to do something and when it was completed rebooted without the stick. It just rebooted into QTS (eventually). I rebooted and checked the bios and found that there was no listing of the SSDs as a boot target. The bios is pretty cut down and I updated to the latest version available but could not resolve this.

I want to use the NVME drives for speed of boot and lower power consumption where possible. I have tried many ways to get this to work. I can boot from a USB drive but not from the nvme drives on the card. I suspect this is a QNAP hardware thing, though I am pursuing it with them to find out. So my questions come down to this.

a) Has anyone ever succeeded in getting this combination to work?
b) Is there an alternative route? Maybe getting a USB drive as a small boot redirector to the SSDs?
c) Should I bundle up the SSDs and the card and send them back to Amazon and go back to spinning stuff?

Any advice gratefully received.

 

[elvisimprsntr]

I initially installed TrueNAS on a SSD in an external USB enclosure on my TS-x53A NAS. While not recommended for long term use, it allowed me to kick the tires without loosing a path back to QTS JIC. Once I confirmed the TS-x53A hardware was supported, I replaced the on board Apacer 512MB eUSB DOMs with 16GB SLC eUSB DOMs for TrueNAS. Works for me, but I don’t have any heavy workloads requiring anything more. I could have continued to use the SSD in an external USB enclosure, but since USB Type A connectors don’t have a locking mechanism, I didn’t want something external that might become disconnected.

 

[addisynnancy]

I initially installed TrueNAS on a SSD in an external USB enclosure on my TS-x53A NAS. While not recommended for long term use, it allowed me to kick the tires without loosing a path back to QTS JIC. Once I confirmed the TS-x53A hardware was supported, I replaced the on board Apacer 512MB eUSB DOMs with 16GB SLC eUSB DOMs for TrueNAS. Works for me, lolbeans but I don’t have any heavy workloads requiring anything more. I could have continued to use the SSD in an external USB enclosure, but since USB Type A connectors don’t have a locking mechanism, I didn’t want something external that might become disconnected.

If we can't disconnect, do we have any other method?

 

[tre4B]

I can get TrueNAS running happily on a spinning drive, just not on the NVME drives that are on the QM2.2P.244A card. I think TrueNas is installing on them fine, they just are not available to boot from. @elvisimprsntr I think I am getting from your post that you are using USB devices to boot from is that right? I have an external NVME adaptor so I could try setting up on that and seeing if that works, it's not ideal but might work.