Thinking about putting together a nas sever/drive
using Intell’s i3 10100, H410/510 mobo and 16gb ddr ram ( parts laid around )
Won’t be running 24/7 , just as when needed to use with Plex
Question is ,i have 2x3tb and 1x6tb hdd (WD Reds) total 12tb/ish , if i was to buy 1x12tb drive could i set up truenas so that the new 12tb drive ( or vice versa) be in use as redundancy in say a mirror config?
or im thinking wrong ?
You will need a separate boot drive (SSD) and a drive (SSD) to store your Plex app and Metadata (and temp Transcode) files on.
You can then create a single pool with 2 vDevs - 2x3TB mirror, and 2x6TB mirror giving you c. 9TB of useable disk space. (What you can’t do is take the 6TB drive and mirror it across 2x3TB drives somehow joined together.)
You will thus need either 2xNVMe + 4xSATA ports or 6xSATA ports. What ports does your MB have?
If all you want to do is run Plex, there are simpler and less resource-intensive ways to do it.
If your MB has an M.2 PCIe slot, you can probably use it to have a single NVMe card and divide it into (what will look like) 2 or 3 separate NVMe cards, one for boot pool, one for apps pool (and maybe a metadata only L2ARC cache vDev for your HDD pool).
But @dan is not going to tell you how. LoL!!
I suspect that @Sykotik needs a reasonable amount of HDD storage, (hence a new and separate system) and probably some degree of redundancy hence ZFS, and if you want large storage and ZFS and apps, and some UI for managing it, and perhaps the possibility of new things once you have got it running, then perhaps TrueNAS is a good way to achieve this.
1x nvme and 4 sata ports , i was thinking about adding a PCIe to sata with a few extra ports for later down the line …
im aware of needing a SSD boot drive just forgot to mention it
i have dabble in truenas last year and got the basic’s of it , just wasn’t sure what i could and couldn’t do with drives …
Install Windows, install Plex on Windows. Simple.
The reason why im looking in to building the NAS i have quite a bit of media that i use with Plex ,
At the moment i just have an external caddy with a 6tb WD Red but that is quickly running out of space , i do have backups across other HDD’s so if anything was to happen to the main drive , i still have my media …
but looking at a getting a bigger drive say 12 or 14tb drive …
so me thinks about building a little nas box throw all my drives in it , and have about 12tb of space
I guess i could carry on doing what im doing and have 12/14tb in the external caddy ?
You are better off with a file system like ZFS that supports redundancy.
I used to run Plex on my Windows laptop (which has 2xSSD and 2x4TB HDDs), and do backups (of non-Plex normal data) to my wife’s laptop (2x 4TB HDDs as well) but despite the size ran out of space - hence my NAS both to hold media and to provide a backup server.
Also, NAS is located near my broadband router / LAN switches so it gets the benefit of Gb Ethernet connectivity, and so Plex client is much more responsive.
So my understanding is , to have a decent amount of space say 12/14tb -im going to need 2x12/14tb drives , and use them for my plex media …
any other drives i add "after "i will have make a separate “pool” but all drives need to be the same size ?
can i have Plex running from to two different “pools”?
A TrueNAS has one or more pools. A pool is composed of one or more vdevs. A VDev is composed of one or more drives.
You can add vdevs after the fact to a pool.
A VDev can be a stripe (one drive) or a mirror (2 or more drives, all mirrors (identical) of each other), or raidz1 (3 or more drives, with one drive worth of parity), raidz2 (4 or more, 2 drives of parity) or raidz3 (3 drives of parity), or draid (yeah don’t worry about it)
The drives in a VDev can be any size, but the drives will only utilize the space of the smallest drive, so a 3-way raidz1 made of 1 2TB and 2 12TB disks will be as if it were made of 3x 2TB disks. BUT when you replace the 2TB drive with a 12TB disk, then your raidz1 VDev will expand to 24TB + 12TB of parity from 4TB.
You can add another VDev of any type and size at any time.
But you can only remove a VDev if all vdevs are the mirror or stripe
You can add an additional disk to a stripe or mirror to increase its redundancy, and you can remove disks from mirrors too.
And then there are special vdevs, cache vdevs and log vdevs too.
You can not go from raidz1 to raidz2 etc after the fact. In electric eel you will be able to add another disk to a raidz (1/2/3) VDev, but not remove, but that is due in October, not today.
K.I.S.S. and not meant as an insult. If you already have a backup of the media then I say you just buy that 14TB drive and place it into your caddy.
This means limited techical changes, less cost, less power draw.
Another thing you could do is just delete media you likely won’t use for the next 10 months. Assuming that is a reasonable request for you.
Many people was a huge library, I did. But there were few movies I would watch often and those were for my grandkids years ago.
Give it some thought. If you still want a TrueNAS system, I recommend you use proper parts, meaning ECC RAM for example.
Good luck
You could. It’s not a very robust or supported solution.
You could manually partition the 12TB and use it as a 3rd partition with two 2 3TB drives and a second with the 6TB drive.
I’d probably suggest buying a 6TB drive.
Now you have two mirrors.
I get the desire for redundancy in enterprise use cases. I don’t get why home users would want to bother with boot drive redundancy because it uses up extra ports and extra drives. Especially considering that your boot device is easily reproducible and kind of the whole point of TrueNAS being a “firmware” appliance in the first place.
When most people already complain about the “expensive” cost that they’re trying to salvage old gaming machines/parts, etc. Judging from OP’s remark “parts laid around”, it seems to fit this category. Personally, if I were already in that mindset, I would be saving that drive/port/money and using/investing that somewhere else.
My updated thinking…
Use the M.2 slot for a boot drive by buying the cheapest decent quality NVMe drive that you can.
Make sure your WD Reds are CMR drives and NOT SMR drives (because SMR drives are completely unsuitable for redundant ZFS vDevs).
In terms of disk configurations:
Buy another matching 6TB drive and create 2 mirrored vDevs (2x3TB, 2x6TB) in a single pool, giving you 9TB of usable space with single redundancy (you can lose a single drive in a mirror and not lose data); or
Buy another 2 matching 3TB drives and create a RAIDZ1 pool from 4x3TB drives for 9TB of useable space. (Buying 2x3TB is probably very similar cost to 1x6TB, but you will have a 6TB drive left over for use elsewhere.)
Whats the best way to check what
drives i have ?
Crm SMR !
First you need to get the exact model number off the drive label (or even better from within TrueNAS).
Then you need to use your favourite search engine to search for this exact model number and the word “specification” or “spec”.
If you need any further help on how to use a search engine, then there are more specialised web sites than this one that can help you with that.
You could use my little script in my link below. It will identify SMR drives with a warning message ONLY if you have one. But the easiest way is to do as the others have said, look up the model on the manufacture website. It should say CMR or SMR. ZFS does not like SMR drives.
I can certainly recommend @joeschmuck 's Multi-Report script. You run it once per day and it does a lot of sanity checks on the health of your disk subsystem and it can also email you your system configuration file once per week in case your boot drive dies and you need the file to recover with a newly built boot drive.
