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Don't try to move TrueNAS to a new host. That's not going to work well. You should setup the new NAS and then do a ZFS send and receive to move data.

If you are reusing the disks you can just export and then import the pool.

Don't forget to 'export' the zpool before moving the disks. Afterwards, you 'import' it on the new system. That's all it needs.

If you use proxmox, then Truenas is kinda redundant, since proxmox can manage your zpool as well.

I've never used TrueNAS, but my experience with ZFS is that it could care less what order the drives are detected by the operating system. You could always shut down the machine, swap two drives around, boot back up, and see if the pool comes back online. If it fails, shut it back down and put the drives in their original locations.

If you are moving your data to new (larger) drives, before anything else you should take the opportunity to play with the new drives and find the ZFS settings that work well. I think recordsize is autodetected these days, but maybe for your use things like dedup, atime, and relatime can be turned off, and do you need xattr? If you're using 4096 block sizes did you partition the drives starting at sector 2048? Did you turn off compression if you don't need it? Also consider your hardware, like if you have multiple connection ports, can you get a speed increase by spreading out the drives so you don't saturate any particular channel?

Newer hardware by itself can make a huge difference too. My last upgrade took me from PCIe x4 to x16 slots, allowing me to upgrade to SAS3 cards, and overall went from around 70MB/s to 460MB/s transfer speeds with enough hardware to manage up to 40 drives. Turns out the new configuration also uses much less power, so a big win all around.

Q1: No it shouldn't matter as long as you didn't import the pool using device names (sda, sdb, etc...). If you're using labels or UUIDs (the better option for portability sake). If they do happen to use device names, just export the pool and then reimport it on the same system using labels or UUIDs.

Q2: It should work just fine assuming you're not using device names for your pools

Q3: it's just as robust as FreeBSD's implementation. Once again, see the answer to Q1.

Q4: IMO virtualizing your NAS just adds more headaches and performance overhead compared to running it on bare metal.

Out of my years running TrueNAS on and off, I've always had issues with it when doing anything other than using it purely as a storage box. I tried 24.04 a few weeks ago, thinking that most of the issues I had originally when SCALE was launched would be resolved. They weren't. So I went back to Arch w/OpenZFS...again

I can answer Q1. The order definitely does not matter. All the drives are aware of who they are, so when you import, as long as they are all present, you're good.

1. The order doesnt matter as long as they are the same drives, you dont have a usb dock or raid card in front of them (ie sata/sas/nvme only)and you have enough of them to rebuild the array. Ideally all of them but in a dire situation you can rebuild based on 2 out of 3 of a Raid Z1

2. You can do that, you shouldn't but you can. I've done something similar before in a nasty recovery situation and it worked but don't do it unless you have no other option. I highly recommend just downloading the config file from your current truenas box and importing it into a fresh install on a proper drive on your new machine.

3. Sort of already mentioned it but you can take your drives, plug them into your new machine. Install a fresh Truenas scale and then just import the config file from your current setup and you should be off to the races. Your main gotcha is if the pool is encrypted. If you lose access to the key you are donezo forever. If not, the import has always been pretty straightforward and ive never had any issues with it.

4. Lots of people virtualize truenas and lots of people virtualize firewalls too. To me, the ungodly amount of stupid edge cases, especially with consumer hardware that break hardware passthrough on disks (which truenas/zfs needs to work properly) is never worth it.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

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