Pool of internal drives not mounting during reboot after connecting a separate pool of USB drives

[Rarity]

My system is the TrueNAS Mini X with five 16TB WD Red Pro NAS drives in it. I have installed TrueNAS SCALE on it, replacing TrueNAS CORE. I wanted backups, so I set up another system with some EasyStore USB drives I had. Syncing over my network was going to take too long. I zpool export EquestriaBackup, plugged the USB drives into my TrueNAS system, zpool import EquestriaBackup, then set up a replication task to copy data from Equestria to EquestriaBackup. A week later I removed the drives, connected to the other system, set up a replication task to work with my remote system, and everything worked.
Unfortunately now whenever I reboot my TrueNAS system, it's no longer importing my Equestria pool (internal drives). Anytime I reboot my system, I need to zpool import Equestria and then it's back to working.
In short, I attached some USB drives with a pool created on a separate system, imported them on TrueNAS, copied datasets, exported pool, now my system won't mount the original pool on boot anymore.

From what I've read about, the system may be expecting the USB drives to still be attached and trying to import EquestriaBackup from those along with the regular Equestria pool on the internal drives.

I may be worth emphasizing that I did not use the GUI when importing/exporting the drives.

What did I break and how do I fix this? I haven't tried reinstalling TrueNAS but I feel that's unnecessary right now.

 

[Rarity]

I tried reconnecting the USB drives with the EquestriaBackup pool and indeed my TrueNAS system will automatically connect the Equestria pool. I wondered if I exported the EquestriaBackup pool if that would reset some flag somewhere. Using the web gui, I import the backup pool. It's been over a day now and 1) "Task Manager" says it's still importing the pool, 2) backup pool does not show up under "Storage", but 3) zpool list shows both pools. I'm not sure why the pool has been imported behind the scenes, but the rest of the system does not seem to acknowledge it.

 

[joeschmuck]

Unfortunately I do not have any advice that would directly help you, but you should be posting your zpool status results along with any other data or screen captures that could be helpful for use to understand what is going on. Also list your system specs. I know you said it's a Mini X but how much RAM does it have? I'm sure it's enough but it's best to never make assumptions.

I do have a few things to say about what you did but those comments would not help you resolve your issue.

It seems like the easiest way to resolve the issue is to reinstall Scale.

You should be aware that Scale is not ready for prime time, it's still being tested in spite of it being marked as a release.

And always use the GUI if possible.

Last note... The EasyStore USB drives, are they CMR or SMR? I don't need to know the answer, you definitely do and I hope they are CMR, many are but you just never know until you check.

 

[Rarity]

I reinstalled TrueNAS Scale and everything seems to be working fine now. Luckily I remembered to back up my configuration file. Saved some time! I'll be wary of plugging in USB drives into my system next time.

My system has 32GiB of memory.
I don't know if my EasyStore USB drives are CMR or SMR nor do I know how to find out.

 

[indivision]

There are a lot of EasyStore USB products. But, I couldn't find any that clarified CMR or SMR. I'm not really surprised though. Because this is a quality that is more important to server storage. And USB drives like this aren't typically used in a server setting.

You could probably find out by calling WD and giving them the product number.

If you want to use USB drives like that for temp storage of non-critical data during server work, etc. I would recommend plugging them into a client machine and transferring in/out through SMB. It would obviously be slower. But, you would be connecting to an OS the drive is made for rather than the more specialized server OS.

 

[Rarity]

These drives are serving as a backup until I can afford a more robust setup. Honestly I'm just using a RaspberryPi I have with these USB drives plugged in. Most of the time the drives aren't even spinning except for when syncing with the primary NAS once a day. The setup is fine save for my TrueNAS system not mounting its own drives properly. Reinstalling the OS seems to have fixed that issue. No data was ever lost. Just a bit of my time. Though I could say it was good practice for potential future problems.

I'll try to figure out if my EasyStore drives are SMR or CMR. I have four of them and it would be a shame if I wasn't able to use them.

 

[joeschmuck]

No data was ever lost. Just a bit of my time. Though I could say it was good practice for potential future problems.

Exactly, that was not time wasted, it was experience gained. You will likely have a lot of that. TrueNAS isn't really problematic but it does take some investment of your time, it's not a setup and forget it or you will get the devils horns someday.

I'll try to figure out if my EasyStore drives are SMR or CMR. I have four of them and it would be a shame if I wasn't able to use them.

I'd try to find out what the hard drive model and serial numbers are, do an internet search for something like "easystore drive model# cmr" and see what it pulls up. Someone else may have done most of the work for you. While it seems like traditionally the drives are CMR, you should know for certain before using them in a system.

There are some tricks/test you can do to check if the drive is SMR. Do an internet search on that. I hear that you can start rewriting data and basically the drive response rate drops. I have never tried it myself, I don't have any SMR drives, well I might have one external USB hard drive, but that keeps a backup copy of my important files that i manually copy once every few months. It's not much data, a few MB's.

 

[indivision]

Honestly I'm just using a RaspberryPi I have with these USB drives plugged in.

What OS is on the Pi?

The setup is fine save for my TrueNAS system not mounting its own drives properly.

Hopefully. I'm concerned though that it may seem fine taking in small writes. But, may not do what is needed in an emergency case when you need to restore from this system. Also, an ideal backup is at another location.

I think you could sell those USB drives and likely have enough earnings to cover a years worth of a cloud backup solution that would sync with your better server. Check out backblaze.

Another note: It sounds like you have 60TB of HD space in the main server. But, 32GB of ram. Someone else correct me if I'm wrong. But, from the hardware recommendations I've read, you should try to have a GB of ram per TB of HD space being managed.

 

[Rarity]

Since I am not deduplicating my data, I don't need 1GT ram/1TB disk. The ram usage on my system rarely even goes above half and when it does it's often a service like PLEX which is being a hog. Right now my system is only using 5GB out of 32GB and that's even with the replication task going on at the moment.

I'm using Raspian on my backup pi. I would love to upgrade my backup plan I just wouldn't know what market to sell the drives on.

 

[indivision]

Since I am not deduplicating my data, I don't need 1GT ram/1TB disk. The ram usage on my system rarely even goes above half and when it does it's often a service like PLEX which is being a hog. Right now my system is only using 5GB out of 32GB and that's even with the replication task going on at the moment.

I'm going by this: https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/

What the ram usage goes to is not necessarily a good measure of what is optimal as software will limit itself to an amount proportional to what is available.

I'm using Raspian on my backup pi. I would love to upgrade my backup plan I just wouldn't know what market to sell the drives on.

ebay