 So, we've decided to upgrade our FreeNAS box, and we're happy that project went really, really well, really, really smooth. But it also has to do with the design of FreeNAS, and not everybody understands a few concepts of how it works. So the project went like this. We had a motherboard with six SATA ports, and we had six hard drives in there. Good enough for what we're doing, but not good enough for what we want to do. Because we want to add some more volumes in here, and I want to play with some of the VM system in here. I wanted to put a SSD array in there. And doing that, well, with only six drives in there and only six SATA ports, we were kind of stuck. And I could put a prize squeeze in the case it was in, maybe two more drives, because if they were the SSDs, but the case was kind of full of drives, it wasn't very efficiently laid out. So we got this case, and this was given to us from a friend. Thank you very much, Nick, for giving us that case as a friend of ours, who also likes the YouTube channel and dropped it off for me. And this case is older, which created a little bit of a problem for us. We had to modify the power supply on it. And I say had to, as in we couldn't stand all the noise that the fans made. Room, like a jet engine, I know. We also realized that they're using about 70 watts just to run the power supply without even a motherboard plugged in. That just wasn't going to work for us. So with a little bit of ingenuity, we mounted a standard power supply to the bottom of the case. Now, because this mounts at the bottom of a rack, and it's our rack in our system, this EVGA power supply, we bolted on the bottom and put it all together. Actually, it made cable management pretty easy. Having it just hanging off the bottom of the back of the case, no big deal, nothing's in the way. Cables routed through where the old power supplies went, and away we go. And because standard power supplies are fairly inexpensive, we went on and ordered two modular power supplies. That way, if the power supply ever goes out, I just go grab another one and pop it in there. We decided to use this controller here, because, well, that ended up a friend sent this to me. We got this Iocress 16 port SAS PCIe. You can pick them up on Amazon. Looks through about $199 right now. And it works great. There's one person has a bad review that says it runs a little hot. We did notice it run a little hot, but we really didn't have an issue. We have good airflow in this case. So it's definitely warm to the touch. But we put that in. And one nice thing about the way FreeNAS works, we plugged in all of the drives, all the volumes, are now on this, and that we still have the other ones. We just went to the bottom rows, and this went to the top rows, and we put the drives in the top rows. Because of the way FreeNAS works, it goes into the volumes and matches up the drives and imports them. FreeNAS doesn't care. More specifically, ZFS doesn't care. ZFS doesn't care where it was. So the way the drives work on FreeNAS is it doesn't say that this drive is plugged into ADA1 or ADA2. You can flip these drives, you can swap them back and forth, and move them around in the system. And it's using the signature on the drive to figure out which volume it belongs to. So these three TBs here are not paired up in the same slots, just the way it lined up across the slots when I was putting these in. It doesn't really matter to the system. Matter of fact, we purposely, on this system, put a gap. We put a row at the top, we skipped a row, and we put another row in. And that's really because just to dissipate the heat between the drives because they're so close to each other, this seemed to be a little bit cooler. We first had them all in together, and we realized we were running a little bit hot. And this helped cool them down by putting a little bit of a gap, so one row gap. And we're actually going to reuse the middle ones. We're going to put an SSD array in there. We're in the process of acquiring some SSDs, and it's going to be for some more testing things at some of the future expansion stuff we want to do. But this is really nice, the way it works, because free NAS, if I have to rearrange the drives, I can just power off the machine while it's off. When it powers back up, it doesn't care if the drives are rearranged. It just picks them up, goes whatever order they're in. I found all the drives that belong to this pool, and I have no errors. Now you can take this, this is hot swap and live, so we can swap out a drive that's bad and put it in there and go through the rebuild process. I have another video on that about replacing hard drives in free NAS. It handles drive failures perfectly fine. We had some drive failures, kind of. We had some Toshiba drives in here, and they just seem to have a hard time with free NAS. They kept throwing errors, having lots of read errors, but I pulled the drives out and I'm actually using one of the three terabyte Toshibas in my computer, works perfectly fine. It just doesn't like being in the free NAS. We never really investigated too much as to why. We just picked up a different brand drive, put it in there, and the problem just disappeared. Back to the free NAS box. We also added some more memory in here, and I plan to do some more videos on how the VMs work. I started messing with it a little. I don't have any VMs running at the moment to show you guys, but that's kind of how the upgrade project went. And a lot of it's just the resiliency of it. So you can swap motherboard, you can swap whichever you want inside a free NAS, and it doesn't really care. As long as it finds those volumes and the config file works, it can automatically grab those volumes, mount them and all your shares and all your information comes back up. But something important I'm going to point out here. When you're backing up free NAS, there's the config backup, and then there's the key backup. This is a key drive here we keep the security on. So these drives have a key. We can change the passphrase because we actually have a passphrase on them too, which means I have to type it in each time we reboot the server. But really important is that we download the key. Click download now. It wants to know the root password, and it downloads a key that we keep a backup off of the free NAS box. This is so critical because without that key, I can't remount the hard drives. And people sometimes think that when you're in here and they go to system and to general, that downloading the save config, like that'll do it. No. Even if you export the password secret seed, it's not going to allow that to restore. So here's the config DB, and then I got to go over to the volumes and download the key file. So those are the backup files. And it's a key for each volume you have set. So we have each of these volumes set. We have a key for each volume. That being said, you want to make sure you have a backup of those. That's really, really critical to making this work properly. So just wanted to comment on that. I've said it before in other videos and I've had people tell me they've had horror stories of, oh yeah, no one told me I had to back up the key. I thought just by backing up my free NAS, it would do it. But this is, you know, overall a little bit of a video to show you that we upgraded it, talk about the upgrade, talk about what we used to upgrade it and the fact that free NAS is kind of hardware agnostic. So if I take these volumes and I pop them in another free NAS box, I can just import those volumes. And if the volume's encrypted, I do have to have the key as well. But I can simply just move them back and forth like this. So it's really nice, it's really convenient. And I know there's been plenty of discussion about, oh, you're using some consumer hardware to run your RAID system. That's part of the beauty of free NAS is I can pop in another motherboard and it would just boot right back up and go, there you go, it's working. It doesn't really care. As long as it can get to the drives and get to the volumes and I have the proper encryption key, I can import the volume and have it up and running right away. So this is part of the beauty of free NAS. Well, thanks for watching. If you have some questions or comments, leave them below. Thanks for watching, like and subscribe. Have a great day.