Which version to install: 11.3 U5 instead of 12.0 U3?

[seldo]

Thanks for the details. It makes sense that the swap is encrypted.

About the swap, I also got the recommendation to not store it on the boot drive: https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/which-ssd-as-boot-device.91938/#post-637157
I'll be on a 64GB SSD.
I'm ok having swap on the drives that form a pool. I just hope to never hit swap or I'll have more drive activity (= noise).

Regarding my original request, I'm heading toward 11.3 U5 because it's been longer around and is in a more stable stage (U5).
I will survive configuring SMB more by hand if required, since I'll only have... two users :D

I still have to decide how to move my data from one pool to another. I guess I'll send | receive.
I just have to research/try it on a VM, but I think send | receive from an older zfs version to a newer one shouldn't cause issue and the receiving pool will stay in the new zfs version.

 

[winnielinnie]

I'm ok having swap on the drives that form a pool. I just hope to never hit swap or I'll have more drive activity (= noise).

I suppose it depends on your setup and use-case. I mainly use my TrueNAS (previously FreeNAS) system for archives, automatic home user backups (from different PCs), Plex, Torrents, and dumping and opening a bunch of different media files and other miscellaneous files. I have never seen the system resorting to using swap, and this is on a "measly" 16GB of RAM. Others might share different experiences on how often their systems resort to using swap.

USB sticks are no longer recommended as boot devices, while SATA SSDs and M.2 are much more robust and the costs have come down quite nicely in recent times! Installing FreeNAS/TrueNAS to a mirror that consists of two 64GB SATA SSDs is not beyond the feasibility of a home user's setup nor budget, like it might have been in years prior. If you do decide to have the installer place 16GB swap on the boot devices, it will do so on both drives (assuming you have 2 SSDs for boot) ; similar to what is done with your data drives. The only difference is it defaults to 2GB per data drive (during pool creation), while the installer essentially thinks "These boot devices will house the OS itself and some config files, and maybe the System Dataset. 64GB is overkill... how about we drop a nice cozy16GB swap in here and make use of this extra capacity that will probably never be touched?"