Help with setup please

TrueNAS General
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I’ve just received my xi min + system and I’ve create a pool but that as far as I’ve gotten. I’ve read for 3 weeks the posts and am totally confused on how tom set this thing up for plex and to get my movies and other media on it. Can some one hold my hand and walk me through the se3tup process. The system is as follows, xi mini + with 64 gigs of ram, 5 14 tb hard drives and two 450 ssd’s, thank you for the help

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its running truenas scale

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5x 14TB drives in Raid-Z2 as bulk storage in one VDEV / pool. 2x SSD in a mirror VDEV for applications and VMs.

Suggesting Raid-Z2 because of the size of the drives and that gives you two drives of redundantcy. Suggesting Mirror of SSD for faster storage of apps and VMs, one drive of redundancy.

I don’t believe you need L2ARC nor SLOG devices for your use case.

BASICS

iX Systems pool layout whitepaper

Special VDEV (sVDEV) Planning, Sizing, and Considerations

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It depends on what you intend this system to do. What were your expectations when you purchased the system? Otherwise we can give you several recommendations but each one will have a different result.

Read the links @SmallBarky provided. Also, if you did purchase from iXsystems, they will provide support I believe for a short period of time and longer if you purchased a support contract. Use them.

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it’s planned on being an expensive plex server. I have 40 tb of movies and photos I need to load from usb drives

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i deleted my original; pool I wanted to start from the beginning and now for some reason IO cannot create another pool

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I guess you have to go with 5x 14TB in a Raid-Z1 to get more space. You will only have a single drive of redundancy and that is risky if you have a drive replacement and resilver going on with those large drives. Raid-Z2 would have left you no space.
Is this data going to grow? Can you return the drives and get larger models? Do you have the data stored elsewhere in case of pool failure / data loss?

5x Raid-Z1 with 14TB drives is 56TB
5x Raid-Z2 with 14TB drives is 42TB

Those are just rough numbers and you will have less actually. Needing to add space could be just around the corner and that has you replacing all five drives with larger models, one by one and allowing resilvering of the pool

You should be able to post screenshots if you need help with errors, now.

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With that in mind, you do not need the SSD’d, just saying. One could be a boot drive I guess.

As for capacities, let’s talk reasonable USABLE space:
RAIDZ1 with the 5 drives gives you about 49TiB (54TB) of USABLE space.
RAIDZ2 with the 5 drives gives you about 36TiB (40TB) of USABLE space.

Given the large capacity of the drives, I recommend a RAIDZ2.
Why you ask?
Here are the reasons:

  1. Large full hard drives take a very long time to Resilver, possibly days.
  2. If you have a RAIDZ1 and have to replace a drive, your data will be VERY susceptible to complete loss if another drive fails while the resilvering is happening.
  3. If you have a RAIDZ2 and have the same situation, your data is 2 drives of safety.
  4. When you decide to upgrade your drives to a larger capacity, you have to resilver a new drive in and thus putting your data at huge risk with a RAIDZ1.
  5. Using a RAIDZ2, you can comfortably increase the drive size with larger 26TB drives if you desire and when you replace that last drive, POP you get roughly 10TB of more space.

I round down my numbers because it is a safe margin of error. So much goes into these values and if you are storing a lot of uncompressible data (like videos), then you can’t say you will have a good compression ratio, so I round down.

I hope this makes sense to you.

One last thing to say… A NAS is not a backup for your data, unless you have a second copy elsewhere. For photos, burn some DVD’s or Blueray’s, they work great for storing this kind of content in a very safe format.

You need to be specific here, did you delete the pool, destroy it, whatever, and exactly what are you doing and what isn’t it doing? I say specific because while we may know what to do, we have no idea if you do and if you are doing it correctly. Do not let us make any assumptions, it causes problems.

Post the output of zpool import to see what may be available and it will tell us how to get you back up and running.

Best of luck to you.

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