Pool offline after unscheduled reboot

[DaTechGuy]

As the title indicates, I have a pool that is offline. I can see the drives in TrueNAS Beta, but they are not showing up as part of the pool.

A little background. I am new to TrueNAS/FreeNAS. I setup my first FreeNAS box about 3 weeks ago and then converted it to TrueNAS. Things seemed like they were working better under TrueNAS for several days. Then I had a drive drop out of the one pool that I setup and was experimenting with. I had already had this happen with a different drive while I was running FreeNAS. I had not yet had a chance to pull the drive and test it when the now TrueNAS box had an unscheduled reboot and the whole pool went offline. That was a few days ago.

I do not have anything important on the pool, but I am treating it like I do in hopes of learning how best to recover from this situation in the future, when I might have important information on the pool.

What do I need to try first? I have already tried rebooting the system to see if the pool will fix itself.

 

[joeschmuck]

Did you ever fix this problem? If not, list all your hardware and the configuration. Also you might need to make a bug report, please be as descriptive as possible.

 

[DaTechGuy]

No, it is not fixed.

Hardware:
Boot drive: OWC Mercury Electra 6G SSD 120GB
Storage drives: Seagate 2TB ST2000DM001 x 3 (although one failed and is not recognized by TrueNAS.)
Motherboard: SuperMicro X7SPA
Processor: Atom D510
RAM: 4GB

Can you elaborate on what you mean by configuration? Is there a command that you want the results from? Config file that I should copy and past here?

 

[joeschmuck]

RAM: 4GB

You don't have enough RAM and can run into a lot of problems, especially when running newer software. I'm not saying this is your problem here but it could be a factor.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by configuration?

What version of FreNAS/TrueNAS you are running, is it running on bare metal, how are the hard drives physically connected to the computer (data cables), RAIDZ/MIRRORS/etc...

 

[DaTechGuy]

I understand about the RAM. Even when I was doing a test backup to the system I never saw it go above about 30% RAM usage. 4GB is the max that this motherboard will handle.

The TrueNAS server is running on bare metal. The drives are SATA drives connected directly to the motherboard. I upgraded to TrueNAS-12.0-BETA a few days before the pool went offline. I set the pool up as a RAIDZ1.

 

[joeschmuck]

I would suggest rolling back to the previous version of FreeNAS that was working for you and see if you can get your pool back online.

While I understand that 4GB RAM is all your motherboard can handle, it still does not meet the minimum specs required to run FreeNAS. With that said, if all you are doing is running FreeNAS in a minimum configuration and nothing else, you might be able to get away with it. Look at your SWAP file size, if this is above a zero value then you did run out of RAM and the system was temporarily storing RAM data on the hard drive to free up needed RAM. This is the only sure way I know to find out if your RAM is enough for what you are doing.

Good luck!

 

[DaTechGuy]

Well, on a whim, I updated to TrueNAS-12-RC. The pool is back online, still degraded due to the failed drive, and all the files I put on it as a test are back. I guess there is not anything to troubleshoot now. I am going to do more testing and will start a new thread if this happens again.

FWIW: I would like to build a better system that meets, at least, minimum specs, but my finances will not support that at the moment. What I am really looking for is reliable storage for important files. The majority of which are photos and videos of my family.

 

[joeschmuck]

FWIW: I would like to build a better system that meets, at least, minimum specs, but my finances will not support that at the moment. What I am really looking for is reliable storage for important files. The majority of which are photos and videos of my family.

I hear ya, FreeNAS is very good at ensuring your data is not corrupt however you do take a risk my not having enough RAM. One thing you can do is in TrueNAS, open a Shell window and type swapinfo -m and so long as you are not using up swap space, you should be good. Once you start using swap space all the time, you are taking a penalty to your system. Swap space is great for rare situations but in practice it's best to have enough RAM so swap space is not needed. This does not mean you cannot use swap space, sure things will work but they are apt to work slower, and in some situations, significantly slower. While you may be new to FreeNAS/FreeBSD, you can look up FreeBSD commands to inspect your system and how it's operating. Google can be your friend. I provided one useful command above.

Good Luck