Recommendation needed to add unmatched old drives to NAS

Home Tech Home Lab & Servers
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I have a few hard drives lying around from years ago. Most of them were never really under any use, just holding backup data without much wear. So, instead of just wasting them, I want to add them to my NAS.

I run virtualized TrueNAS on Proxmox off of a 64GB old Kingston SSD (83% health, I know I need to replace it) along with a zfs mirror of 2x 4TB Iron wolf drives.

What would be the best way to add these other hard drives of varying capacities to this box (N150 motherboard from @FortiCore with 6 SATA ports)? I don’t want to lose storage by adding them to the existing pool of 4TB.

Any recommendations welcome.

Also would you recommend to move my TrueNAS to bare metal or is it okay virtualized? How much practical difference does it make? I don’t really have the time for a complete fresh reinstall. Would try to avoid reinstalling afresh as much as possible.

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Buy an Unraid licence during BF sale :slight_smile:

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Don’t want to spend again. Spent quite a bit just on new hardware just last week. :neutral_face:

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If you were on OMV, MergerFS + Snapraid is an option. Xpenelogy has SHR. Not sure about Truenas though (never used it).

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Yeah, mergerfs and snapraid is the only option I know of that can work other than Unraid for unmatced drives.

Or you can make multiple pools for each set of matched drives.

1 Like
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I haven’t really checked out mergerfs and snapraid before. I already have my Truenas scale ZFS pools setup. Not sure if this would require creating the pool from scratch. I’d prefer not to do that since it’s a lot of data in it already. I’ll do my research. Thanks for direction. :slight_smile:

That is an option I was going to try out.