Question Question about upgrading motherboard on TrueNAS

[Shmee]

I am planning to upgrade my current TrueNAS system from the Gigabyte X58 board with Xeon X5660 and 48GB of Crucial DDR3 to the Asus X99 Deluxe with Xeon E5 1660v3 and 256GB of ECC registered DDR4. As far as the OS is concerned, do I need to do anything special before the upgrade, or should it just work fine once I attach the drives to the new board?

 

[Tech Junky]

You should be able to port everything over and run a system update to make sure the the firmware is up to date.

If the system is already setup with GPT for the boot selection it's one less thing to deal with. If it's not it's an easy fix with a livecd and moving the partition over by 50mb and creating an EFI partition and running efi-grub.

 

[Shmee]

The system drive is a legacy boot I think, but I have no idea what the partition table is. It started as an older install of FreeNAS, and got updated. I enabled CSM on my X99 and the BIOS is up to date, so I don't think that should be an issue.

 

[Tech Junky]

Yeah, it should just work but, if you run into a no-boot situation that's where I would be looking.

I ran into it with moving from 8700K to 12700K on the intel side even though the board supported CSM it didn't want to play well until I converted the drive over to GPT and added EFI. I don't think you'll see this though with moving up with Xeon but, it's a consideration if it's vital to have little downtime.

 

[Shmee]

So it seems to be just be working. Well, first I had to change the boot order to the boot drive, it was trying to boot from a data drive lol.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I am planning to upgrade my current TrueNAS system from the Gigabyte X58 board with Xeon X5660 and 48GB of Crucial DDR3 to the Asus X99 Deluxe with Xeon E5 1660v3 and 256GB of ECC registered DDR4.

Does ZFS aggressively cache the data using all available RAM?

 

[Shmee]

Does ZFS aggressively cache the data using all available RAM?

It can, like if you are transferring data to the system, then the ZFS cache will grow!

 

[ch33zw1z]

Does ZFS aggressively cache the data using all available RAM?

Understanding ZFS behaviour regarding disk writes and RAM usage!

I know this isnt technically a FreeNAS Qeustion, but it relates to zfs. Im currently running Linux Mint tara 19.1, but i packed a custom ubuntu kernel with 5.1.9 kernel and zfs 0.8.1, which i install it. Thus i have the latest zfs under the latest linux kernel. System consists of 32core epyc cpu...

www.truenas.com

My anecdote: on boot the ram usage (I have 48GB) is low. But as I start to access the pool, the RAM usage will increase until it’s using most of the memory. ZFS is just doing it’s job

 

[Fallen Kell]

I know this is a little old, but wanted to put some definitive answers in here about ZFS and RAM usage. Yes, a system using ZFS will use all the RAM available to it for caching and optimizing write operations (as well as for other things like generating hashes for the written blocks to watch for silent corruption, and redundancy hashes in the event of raidz or raidz2, and more). This is why it is so important to use ECC RAM on systems that are running ZFS, as any kind of failure in RAM will corrupt data that is being written to the drives.

 

[Shmee]

I know this is a little old, but wanted to put some definitive answers in here about ZFS and RAM usage. Yes, a system using ZFS will use all the RAM available to it for caching and optimizing write operations (as well as for other things like generating hashes for the written blocks to watch for silent corruption, and redundancy hashes in the event of raidz or raidz2, and more). This is why it is so important to use ECC RAM on systems that are running ZFS, as any kind of failure in RAM will corrupt data that is being written to the drives.

Good stuff. I am a bit curious though, is there a way to tell if ECC is working or not? I know the RAM is ECC REG from Samsung, and I have it paired with a Xeon E5-1660v3, but the motherboard is an Asus X99 Deluxe, I am not sure how the firmware would or would not support it. When I look in the TrueNAS control panel, it does say the RAM is ECC, but how do I know the ECC is active?

 

[ch33zw1z]

Starting point: https://www.truenas.com/community/t...working-reporting-correctly-in-freenas.79667/

does the BIOS say it’sactive?

 

[Shmee]

I think I saw that thread, I will have to try that command. It is not easy to navigate the UEFI setup on the TrueNAS, as I currently have no monitor / keyboard hooked up, but I kinda doubt there is ECC config options in setup, though there could be.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Cool just need some ssh action. I was impressed the 2FA thru Authy worked on cli also

 

[Shmee]

Yeah, looks like it is working, when dmidecode -t memory is entered into the shell, it lists multi bit ECC support, and each RIMM entry lists width as 72 bits. I am not sure how to copy the output though.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Yeah, looks like it is working, when dmidecode -t memory is entered into the shell, it lists multi bit ECC support, and each RIMM entry lists width as 72 bits. I am not sure how to copy the output though.

use putty and ssh in, copy and paste

if you’re using windows, just use the screen snip tool to copy and paste

 

[Shmee]

use putty and ssh in, copy and paste

if you’re using windows, just use the screen snip tool to copy and paste

Couldn't I just use the TrueNAS shell in the webmin in firefox?

 

[Shmee]

Anyway, here is the first part of the output.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Couldn't I just use the TrueNAS shell in the webmin in firefox?

u can, I just find putty easier to work with 😉