Advise on a new build with an optical drive?

TrueNAS General
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To start off I am new…ish to Truenas a bit on the older side of life and restricted on hardware … for now. I apologize up front if I ask too many questions but I think that what forums are for and I am southern so if I type something that doesn’t really make since, just ask but most importantly thank you for your time and help with all that I do ask.
I have been reading quite a bit and most of the new guys that want serious help start with their rig and whats inside so this is my current home built NAS. The chasis is a Chenbro RM41300 with a TR2 600W power supply pushing a Gigabyte GA-H170M-D3H motherboard with only 8gb of Crucial brand DDR4 RAM. I stuck a IO Crest 4 port SATA III Expansion card and I pulled my old pool out of the OG truenas which was just Truenas 13.0 that I blissfully experimented in building which in turn became temp-a-permanent NAS which are 3 x 4TB HDD Western Digital WDC WD40PURZ-85TTDY0, 2 x 8TB HDD Seagate Barracuda ST8000DM004-2U9188, 1 x 2TB HDD WD WDC WD2000F9YZ-09N20L1, 1 x 120GB SDD Crucial brand where I believe my Truenas 25.04 scale is loaded AND 1 x 256GB M.2 SDD Samsung MZVLW256HEHP-000L7 (4L7QCXB7) with Linux mint 22.1 which at the moment takes first place in the bios for boot order but I’m researching on how to change that cause this rig came from some guberment place and is running American Megatrends bios version 2.17.1249 which I’m slightly skidish on messing with too much and last but most important for me is an Asus multi optical drive.

Main question I have is how to get that optical drive to work the most effective way?? I currently have my one and only pool imported (that took some freaking out!! A few walk away moments and after some coffee, searching and a lot of reading to get imported CAUSSEEEE yours truly didn’t have a backup of my config files. Learned that lesson!) into my new Fangtooth but I have a lot of CD’s and DVD’s that I want to burn onto my NAS using that optical drive but not sure how to go about A) getting it (the optical drive) to work on my current rig and B) getting those movies and data added to my library in a … fairly easy way using the GUI OR a better, more efficient, way to setup this up/transfer data from disk to drive?

But this also leads to some side questions about the build itself and which direction to take it cause at the moment I only have the 3 x 4TB setup in raidZ1 (that’s what the setup wizard recommended when it was running on 13.0 during my “experimental” build) in a pool just for playing movies and pictures but I have a big family and virtualization is coming…not if but when. So that brings up more questions:

  1. I had thoughts of setting up the 2 x 8TB’s mirror so that expansion in the future is easier and safer; is this still the current train of thought? Also had thoughts of adding that 2TB to my RaidZ unless better heads prevail?
  2. Any recommended articles of reading for setting up those SDD’s to backup my config files properly OR any other recommendations for them?
    Thank you again for all your help :innocent:
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To my knowledge, no official support. You may have luck passing it through to a VM but I’d recommend just burning the disks on another machine & then moving the files over the network.

There have been many documented issues stemming from people using SATA port multipliers. I’d recommend using a SAS HBA if possible.

RAIDZ Expansion is now possible (though not something I’ve tested personally, and from what I’ve heard it’s a very long process). Whether or not you go for mirror or raidz vdevs should really be based around the type of data you’re storing/accessing and your risk tolerance.

If your current setup is 3x4T, I am pretty sure you won’t able to expand the RAIDZ vdev with a 2T disk. Assuming it does allow you to do so, you’d end up with a logical 4x2T RAIDZ vdev and less space than you started with, with the same amount of redundancy. You could instead configure it as a single-disk vdev pool for backup (some may argue this is not a valid form of backup as it has no redundancy, but it’s better than nothing).

I have a python script for this: truenas-scripts/configuration-backup/configuration_backup_websocket.py at main · essinghigh/truenas-scripts · GitHub, which you can set up as a cronjob via shell to run as needed, like so: 0 3 * * * /usr/bin/python3 /mnt/data/bin/truenas-scripts/configuration-backup/configuration_backup_websocket.py --output-dir /mnt/data/SMB/Backups > /dev/null

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