Yeah, I don't know why it is that web developers are trying to make everything look like a minimalistic cell phone UI these days. That's nice if you are Apple and you're actually fine with not exposing complexities to the end user at all, but FreeNAS isn't that, and all the complexity is just hidden in ways that aren't really that obvious.
Of course, the old GUI was tragic in that way as well. As an example, I'm doing an in-place upgrade of a 11 drive Z3 pool, one drive at a time. In the old GUI, I have to navigate to "View Disks" to see the size and serial on disks. But I have no clue which disk is the disk that's no longer in the pool.
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So then I have to go to Storage -> Volumes and click on the pool, then click on Volume Status. That last little bit I only know how to find because of years of familiarity with FreeNAS... the average user ain't going to find it easily. So then it shows me the component devices by FreeBSD /dev name. I can then play "hunt for the missing number":
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Ok, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, ahh it's 11 that's now missing. Well this is merely tedious on a 12 drive array but would be pretty aggravating on a 96.
I appreciate that the pool has been added to the disks list in the new GUI, a nice step in the right direction, but it would be nice to see some vast improvements in the volume status (now pool status) page.
View attachment 27028
I mean, come on, either decide on partitions or disks. The volume status page refers to partitions ("p2") but does administrative actions on disks. And when it displays things like this, why is it offering to replace disk da10, clearly a 4TB disk, with da1 or da2, which are both in the dozens of GB size range? That can never work, it's dumb to offer it. Plus it would be nice to maybe list the size and serial numbers.
Replacing disk da10, 4TB, 656XYZABC
da11, 8TB, 1STABCXYZ
This would be very useful to those of us here in the trenches.