After almost two years later, the hardware of my Openmediavault NAS is going to be upgraded from Vostro to Precision. Which is a big leap, that I don’t have to do any hardware modification to use Xeon CPUs.

Thanks for my friend’s donation. This junkstation comes with E3-1245, 16GB and 4 SATA HDD port. What I added is a ASMedia 106x SATA PCIE card for 2 more SATA HDD capacity (6 HDD in total), and a PCIe to NVMe adapter for accommodating a OS drive (128GB SSD).

Download TrueNAS-SCALE-25.04.1.iso and rufus it into a USB drive, Ventoy would not work.

Boot from UEFI mode and install TrueNAS into the 128GB SSD on PCIe slot.

Download Clover-5163-X64.iso and rufus it into a 4GB USB 2.0 Drive as bootloader (The motherboard can boot directly from PCIe)

Reinsert the USB drive and copy \EFI\CLOVER\drivers\off\NvmExpressDxe.efi to \EFI\CLOVER\drivers\UEFI\NvmExpressDxe.efi

Unplug the USB drive and insert to the server machine, boot from USB drive with Clover and find the Linux entry, this will boot into TrueNAS and showing the admin password setup screen

Unckeck Usage collection under system gui settings

Check disk health with Storage - Disks - SMART

Go to Storage - Create Pool - Manual Select - Add VDEV and drag’n drop drives

I’m using RAID-Z2 for my 6 HDD setup, it’s a good balance of speed and capacity.

Go to Datasets - Add Dataset, use SMB for Windows and NFS for Linux clients

Adjust settings like Scrub, Snapshot and SMART auto test under Data Protection

Add user under Credentials - Add, then edit ACLs under Shares

Now I can add the shared drive from other client machines

Additionally, select Deny All or Allow Only Update for Outbound Network under Global Configuration inside Network tab for extra security.

Troubleshooting 1: ata4.00: SErr ATA bus error

Log into root on TrueNAS, run to figure out which physical drive is ata4.00

lsblk -S
ls -l /sys/block/sd*

Then check the cable connection or replace the drive

Troubleshooting 2: Refuse Access from Windows clients

Create Datasets with SMB/NFSv4 ACL Type under Advanced Options, or Enable SMB1 support / NTLMv1 Auth under Config SMB service if nessaccery

This build runs very fast and efficient, the CPU/RAM usages are surprisingly low. Thanks to the benefit of RAID-Z2, the performance of my NAS is upgraded into a new level!