After testing TrueNAS on a Junk PC (i7-4770 with 16GB RAM and a GTX 750 Ti) with x2 HDDs (WD Green) (Mirrored), I would like to now plan for setting up a proper Home NAS.
I would like to use it to store my Data/Family Media and be able to back it up to an External Drive.
Looking at consolidating about 4.5TB(?) of Data from a bunch of Hard Drives. And want to have enough headroom for the years to come. Would 16TB of usable space be good?
Also would like to add the following applications under Dockge:
Jellyfin
Immich (Don’t care about the AI Features. Just want to use it for Media Management)
Home Assistant
I could use an R5 3600 with a GTX 950. Are any of these good?
Also want to know how to properly get Nvidia to work with Jellyfin Transcoding.
Since im using UniFi, I would like to be able to see all my NAS/Containers in my Client Devices list/Topology. And assign the VLANs appropriately (Only if possible).
I also want to make sure that I am able to backup all my Configs, Apps, Data with confidence. I also want to Protect the TrueNAS Scale OS/Data from any Ransomware attacks etc… How can this be achieved?
And I would like to use x2 SSDs for the Main OS. Which, I already have. However, is there no absolute way to use the Main OS Drives as the Apps Pool or is this a Feature in the works in an upcoming version?
Skip using 2 drives for the OS. It is a bit of a waste (I’d know, I have it).
Periodically make a backup of your system config & you can reinstall truenas in like… 10 minutes?
Having 2 boot drives is only if you have hotswap bays so you can fix & resilver a boot drive without shutting the system down; entirely pointless for home use. Use the 2nd drive for your apps/vms - bam.
It won’t ever be added as a feature because it was purposefully designed this way (lots of long posts that go over this). You can get around it if you know what you’re doing, but that’d only add additional risk & complexity.
Uhh next points; make sure whatever drives you use are cmr, not smr (google you model to validate).
2 drives, 4 drives, whatever is within your budget & can fit onto your system’s ports while having the boot & app drives. The real question is if you want raidz1 (1 redundant drive), raidz2, or raidz3; or I guess a mirror.
Pick whichever fits your risk tollerance; the only wrong choice is a stripe.
Skip using 2 drives for the OS. It is a bit of a waste (I’d know, I have it).
Thanks for the tip.
Periodically make a backup of your system config & you can reinstall truenas in like… 10 minutes?
Whats the best way to do this? Including my Apps?
Having 2 boot drives is only if you have hotswap bays so you can fix & resilver a boot drive without shutting the system down; entirely pointless for home use. Use the 2nd drive for your apps/vms - bam.
I had this product on the back of my mind for adding a HDD/SSD into a single 5.25” Bay. Would this be a good product at all?
But whats the likeliness of OS Corruption due to having only 1x OS Drive and the SSD fails?
It won’t ever be added as a feature because it was purposefully designed this way (lots of long posts that go over this). You can get around it if you know what you’re doing, but that’d only add additional risk & complexity.
Thanks for the tip. Would stick to having an Apps Pool as it makes more sense.
Uhh next points; make sure whatever drives you use are cmr, not smr (google you model to validate).
Hmm… Interesting… Thanks for that. How important is having a CMR Drive and what issues would arise by using a SMR Drive?
The real question is if you want raidz1 (1 redundant drive), raidz2, or raidz3; or I guess a mirror.
In actually quite new to RAIDZ/ZFS. Been using Mirror in my test NAS. Would be great to squeeze some space by having a Multi-Drive Pool but still retaining redundancy. Any ideas?
Pick whichever fits your risk tollerance; the only wrong choice is a stripe.
Thanks. Not really that worried about having Stripe Drives.
You can try a forum search but I don’t recall ever seeing it.
Those articles mention the WD Reds because they made some SMR drives in their NAS line and they didn’t work well with ZFS. The articles should explain what happens upon heavy usage, like when the drives are resilvering after a failure replacement. There are also multiple forums posts where it was very difficult to get back degraded pools when the users has any SMR drives in the pool.
In general, use only NAS lineups but make sure to check the specs as there are some out there that use SMR and avoid consumer drive lineups.
For System config you can go to Settings>Advanced>Manage config (top right corner)>Download File. It’ll also ask you every time if you want to before you update.
Lot of apps let you backup configs/settings, all the data feeding the apps should live outside the app pool.
I’m not against it, would be better if it had a little fan or something for the drives to be cool.
It’ll eventually die, it ain’t too bad. I think I’ve done a dozen or more clean installs & config re-imports due to messing with things I shouldn’t have. Never had any issues; was like nothing ever went wrong.
I’d argue critical. SMR will sadly work just fine, in fact some folks don’t have any problems at all, until 1 drive fails of old age & then they have to replace the drive & re-silver it… then all of a sudden SMR can’t resilver or takes 3 weeks to do so, another drive dies during the stress of the resilver & now all the data is gone forever.
You could always grab a used HBA if you need more sata ports, then your budget is the limit. For 6-8 drives I like Raidz2 + having some cold spares on hand. It is really hard to guage your personal risk tollarance/budget.
Uhhh, what else? Memtest, memtest, memtest. If you’re really paranoid like I’d encourage you to be, you can get into the weeds a bit & learn about burning in your hard drives before you put data on them; aka spending a week testing each & every block multiple times to make sure they are in perfect health being store warranty expires.
Duuude - we get a few dozen bad cases of random bullshit a year due to memtest. It is apparently never the ram’s fault… until you actually test it.
For example my Plex content lives on my RAIDZ2 pool, while plex itself lives on my app pool. Logic for me is that restoring the app pool takes as long as putting in a new drives, downloading the apps & then re-configuring them based on a few screenshots and/or uploading their configs (depending on what the app allows); so like 20 minutes of time.
All the crap feeding my apps took a long time to gather & lives on my Z2 pool, with redundancies, cold spares, etc.
Yep, it’ll really be as if you never lost your boot drive at all, I cannot stress how magical it is.
Naw, Plex I’m too lazy to makes copies of its folders & directories anything other than my apps pool. I just took a screenshot of its settings & plug the same crap in if it ever dies or goes critically wrong. (usually it only breaks if I screwed something up because I was messing around; one exception was when TrueNAS switched from Kubs to docker)
All the movies/shows/whatever live on my RAIDZ2 pool & feed the plex app itself. In the several times I’ve broken my Plex app, I delete it, redownload it, plug the same settings, open plex, have it scan my content, and re-make my users.
At the very worst, you can make a mirrored app pool - but once you get the permissions & such setup on TrueNAS itself, it isn’t too terrible to just spin the app back up.
Edit:
Also don’t forget to setup scheduled scrubs, cron jobs for SMART tests (basically checks for health of the pool, and health of individual drives)
