so ive done a fair bit of research on a lot of truenas setups and configs this past week as ive been getting it setup and have done A LOT of work with it and finally got a stable system going, for now lol…
but in my search ive come to find no good info on how to add and existing drive with data on it to storage or the plex app without having to wipe it clean first…am i right to believe there is no way to add an external drive with data on it to a pool or create one without wiping it?
has anyone found a different way to add their media drives to a fresh install of the plex app? this is literally about the last thing i need to do to have me setup perfectly DONE for my needs right now…ive got my setup working with a windows 11 vm finally and added my WD drive to the vm and it work that way with plex…but im very interested to use the plex app if its possible…
but even if i cant add the drive…i am in the process of backin up a backup of my media drive, lol, so i can wipe it clean and add it to a pool, then add allllll that media back to it lol…cause thats the second easiest way for me to do with with what i have
Adding external storage is not possible with truenas. You’d have to copy over your media to your truenas box and mount the media dataset inside the plex container.
daaaamn that suuucks lol…thanks for the confirmation…kinda crazy they dont implement that, i mean its seems like a very basic and much needed feature…wonder why they havent added that…but i understand from my bit of research that the system only understands the zfs extension and thats how pools are set up and they want you to use their method…but still seems strange they dont add a way to connect drives with existing data for use…
There was for a long time a feature that would copy data from an external drive to a designated place on your pool, but it never did work well. But neither TrueNAS, nor FreeNAS before it, have ever supported sharing data on an external drive that isn’t a ZFS pool (or, in very early versions, a UFS volume).
also just found out that the truecharts plex app that i wanted to use an external usb hdd with my movies on actually has an option to add an external usb path lmfao…all this damn work i did the past few days trying to transfer 12tb of movies to a different file and wipe a 12tb drive to add to a zfs pool just to move it all back on to it was pretty much for nothing lmfao!!!
I would suggest learning some about ZFS. ZFS in general is designed for resiliency, keeping your data safe and intact. An external USB drive, is not that.
yes i understand…i have a raidz1 pool with 4 4tb drives and its storing most of my data from the external usb drive…so now i can kinda just use the 18tb as a back up…but eventually i would like to get another 18tb drive to mirror it in a pool and then free up my 4tb pool cause the data is killing me in storage right now…i just added a 12tb drive but id doesnt have any redundancy either but im not really using it right now…
i finally got my plex app set up and seeing the media stored in the dataset in the 4x4tb pool…but im definietely interested in the resiliency and redundancy aspect truenas scale offers…just need more money to get the drives i need lol
