I have been doing some research on those cards and yeah there are some places you can get them fairly cheap. The one thing I have been a bit confused about though is it seems like you can just configure drive passthrough directly in Proxmox to virtualized TrueNAS, and from what I understand that is similar/the same to using a physical HBA card in a PCIe slot. I suspect there is something I am still not understanding with that though, so more research for me, haha! Thanks for the advice on the cables :)

Ah, that is good to know and might give me some flexibility with the migration to a new box. I wonder if I’d be able to Proxmox > Ubuntu/Debian VM (I believe I would need a passthrough card based on others comments for this) and then do the data transfer all on the new machine. Old SRH array > Large JBOD disk > Reformat old SRH drives with new drives for vdev/ZFS pool > Copy media back over to new pool > use large JBOD disk in old Synology as a mirror for backups… Hmmm, that is definitely a workflow I am going to explore. Thanks for the info!

Gotcha, thanks! In doing some more research, it looks like you could potential make mirrored vdevs of your smaller disks and then another for your larger drives and add them to the same pool. That may be a workaround to still be able to use ZFS, but I hadn’t heard of SnapRAID so I will definitely check that out, thanks!

You make a good point about just sucking it up and getting all new drives at a much larger capacity though. I am definitely starting to think about that option more closely. Its just obviously expensive as hell when you are also getting a new, much better spec’d, NAS box, haha. Serverpartdeals does have pretty good prices though all things considered so maybe I will bite the bullet and just got for it. Not sure what I’ll end up doing with 4 other perfectly good drives that total 24 TBs though! haha. Although I sure I will find something to do with them, haha. Thanks again for the input and insight. Very much appreciated.

Yeah it honestly sucks what they are doing, otherwise I wouldn’t even be doing this and would be getting a 6 or 8 bay Synology instead. I am just sick of bullshit from these companies and it reeks when you have to buy ‘their’ drives that are literally stickered over Toshiba’s or whatever. Its a bummer, really :/

Thank you for the comment. I can definitely resonate with running out of space much faster than you anticipate. Part of my plan though is to start integrating much larger drives than the 6 and 8 TB drives I’ve currently got. All of the potential NAS boxes I am looking at can well over 50 TB total capacity and since it took me ~5 years to fill 10 TB I think leveraging larger drives will probably be fine with a smaller bay device. I do think I am going to do some additional research on potentially going for a rack solution. Seems like a big jump but I do agree with your premise. Doesn’t hurt to check so thank you for that.

As for price, yeah it would be cheaper to build my own but I’m honestly just not in the mood for that at this juncture in my home lab development cycle. I imagine the upgrade following the one I am currently mapping out will be DIY, Im just not there yet. As for the ZimaCube, when you compare the other 6 bay machines from the other popular providers the cube is actually cheaper and better spec’d with 2 additional on board NVME slots and PCIe expansion slots. The more I have researched it the last couple days though I can’t find confirmation that they have fixed the issue with Ironwolf drives, so I may end up having to choose something else anyway unfortunately.

A few other people have mentioned Unraid as well so I am doing some additional research into the company. With the ever growing trend of enshitification in tech, which is a primary motivator for me doing this move anyway, I don’t know Unraid is the solution for me. You are definitely right about them being the ideal solution for mirroring SRH capability as far as drives go, and I have no problem paying for good software, so I may end up going for Unraid after I test out some of the other options. Thanks for the vote of confidence on it. Based on what I’ve seen from Zima OS so far, all I know is that isn’t the OS I will be using, lol.

Thanks again for you input. Greatly appreciated.

Yeah, I had mentally kind of crossed Unraid off the list from the things I’d seen around the various tech communities regarding them. Not to mention my main goal with this move anyway. I don’t have a problem paying for good software though, so I’ll at least do some more digging on them to make a more informed decision. I just wish there were other options for mix and match drives for people that have slowly been growing into the hobby! haha :( Thank you for commenting.

Thanks for commenting. I had forgotten that Unraid does have the option to mix and match drives ala SRH, which is definitely a big selling point for someone in my current position. I did recall seeing some in the industry express some hesitation with the platform as its not open source and has as good a chance to enshitify their product in the future as any of the other tech companies that have already done so. That caused me to kind of check them off the list since that’s what I am hoping to be getting away from with this migration. I will do some more digging on the company though. I have no problem paying for good software and maybe that ends up being the best route. Thanks again for the insight!

I will definitely check that out, thanks! Out of curiosity, since I don’t have the hardware to play with yet, do you know if you are able to use different sized drives with ZFS pools? I’ve seen that there have been some updates over the past year that should make expanding a ZFS pool doable now, do you know if that is the case? Thanks again for the insight :)

Understood. I do think Im going to start out with Proxmox and kind of feel things out from there. I am also definitely planning to finally bite the bullet and dive into Docker as a primary driver. I’ve heard lots of good things about it and from a technical standpoint it just makes a ton of sense. Thanks again for the input! :)

Very much agreed, that is exactly why I decided to just move on from them now. The writing is on the wall. Sorry for not including that info by the way! We all know what happens when you assume 😅

Thanks for the reply! I’ll admit, I’m not familiar with HBA cards. So I’ll definitely look into that.

As to the nesting you called out, I could see that being an issue. Would that be the case though if you’re doing basically everything through Proxmox and only using TruNAS for disk management? I’m not sure if you watched his video on the setup, but it at least seemed to be okay. I could be wrong about that though, so I appreciate the input.