SOLVED No JBOD in 11?

[Robert Thomspon]

Hey gents... running into a small bit of a tangle here...

Short story long, I built a second FreeNAS box out of an old Dell T3500 i had stashed in a closet... all I was hoping to do was create a temporary storage system for the data I already have stored on my main NAS (im having issues with it and building a VPN/transmission iocage... and want to move it to a clean install of 11.3... also, while im at it, do a little housekeeping on the files that it currently houses anyway)...

ANYWAY, I just threw a bunch of the largest hard drives I had laying around (a 4tb, a 3tb, 2x2tb and a 1tb drive) and was figuring I could just do the old JBOD method of binding the disks together as a large array.... Lo and behold, Ive discovered, 11.3 doesnt like you doing that anymore. Ive researched around and thoight that it was possible to create 5 vdevs with each disk and then combine them all as essentially a 12TB storage pool (i really only need 7.5TB... ) and I dont even mind dropping the 1TB and running the rest as what are effectively 4x2TB drives... it gives me enough space to host the dump...

Is this a thing that is still possible under FreeNAS? or am I chasing a dream in thinking I can get this to work under 11.3 (i dont mind rolling back to an older version if needs be... again, this is just a temp storage solution for a day or two)... Or should I look into using a different OS to do this? (my next guess was to run an ubuntu box with LVM)

Any help is appreciated...

 

[Robert Thomspon]

OK, sorry... figured it out... You need to create each vDev at the same time you are creating the pool... Just a little odder than it used to be (also, to be fair... easier, just not clear and the write-ups for it dont seem to show you how to do this...)

 

[blueether]

I noticed this as well.

 

[Chris Moore]

The documentation will probably need to be improved, but setting up a group of disks as a pool with no redundancy is kind of an edge-case.
I don't think many people use FreeNAS that way, but I could be wrong.

 

[sretalla]

Creating pools for scratch space or for high speed with replication to a protected pool for safety (like I do for jails) is a case... not sure if others do that sort of thing, but it sounds not too unique to me.

 

[Robert Thomspon]

The documentation will probably need to be improved, but setting up a group of disks as a pool with no redundancy is kind of an edge-case.
I don't think many people use FreeNAS that way, but I could be wrong.

I think you're correct tat overall, it is not commonly used with FreeNAS, i think its just an option thats been left in... FreeNAS is built for enterprise level deployments and as such, wouldnt specifically want to be run without any redundancy (there are other OSes out there that would meet the needs for someone more interested in absolute speed with no regard for redundancy... FreeNAS just happens to not be one of them)...

But, I also think it's a more common deployment than you may give it credit for (probably because once you get used to a specific OS, you tend to stick with it as you know it better than trying to learn something new for a small/quick application... like what im doing... Im looking to just have this system up for a day or two... just long enough to dump data, reinstall FreeNAS, dump data back after filtering some of it out... (And yes, I know... i could skip the dump and just reinstall FreeNAS, and it will pick up my pools... i just prefer a clean install without old data...)