TrueNAS Scale Plex media server configuration

TrueNAS General
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I’m new to TrueNAS Scale and zfs. For years, I’ve ran my Plex server from my main gaming rig. I’m in the process of purchasing hardware to move it over to its own dedicated system and I’m looking for some advice on how I should setup my RAID config and whether or not I should have dedicated drives for the log and metadata. So far, I have:

  • 7x 18 TB SAS HDDs to store media
  • 3x 800 GB RI SAS SSDs, 2x mirrored for apps (e.g. Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, etc) and 1x for zfs log
  • LSI 9306-24i HBA in IT mode
  • Quadro RTX 5000

I plan to get:

  • 2x M.2 NVME SSDs to run TrueNAS Scale in a mirror
  • 2x 400+ GB RI SAS SSDs mirrored for zfs metadata
  • Motherboard with 5x PCIe slots; 1 for the GPU, 1 for the HBA, others for potential future expansion
  • Intel-based CPU for Quick Sync in case the video card conks out
  • Max RAM which will be somewhere along the line of 128 GB or higher, depending on the CPU I get

Are there any potential caveats? I saw there can be some difficulties with GPU passthrough? I’m not sure how that works, exactly, when I’ll be using the apps downloaded from the TrueNAS app selection. Do they run in KVM, Docker, or k8ts?

Any suggestions regarding the raidz layout, config, and the ideas I have regarding the log, metadata, apps drives, and anything else I may be missing would be very welcome. Thanks in advance.

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You probably don’t need a special vdev with metadata when you have 128GB RAM. I’d build without, then observe how directory listing behaves. Chances are it’s plenty fast, and you can always add a special vdev later if, and only if, thorough testing shows you’d benefit.

You definitely don’t need a SLOG: All your writes will be async anyway. Simplify, do without SLOG.

Mirror for the boot drive doesn’t hurt, but is also not necessary, as long as you back up the config including the encryption key regularly. For a boot drive, 120GB or so is plenty.

Apps on an SSD mirror is a good idea.

For your main media pool, a 7-wide raidz2 seems reasonable. Set recordsize to 1MB.

You’ll use the GPU only for transcoding. The Intel ARC line is well supported by Plex and fast for that use case, and thus well liked. That also side steps occasional snafus with the NVIDIA driver blobs.

For your motherboard, seriously consider something that supports ECC and has IPMI. Supermicro for Intel or Asrock Rack if AMD. ECC means you are not ever going to have to spend weeks to hunt down mystery RAM errors; and IPMI is just a game changer for maintenance. No keyboard and monitor needed, ever!

Apps on TrueNAS SCALE run in Docker.

VMs run on Incus, that’s a recent change. I’d build with 25.04, just in case you want a VM or two in addition to your Docker apps.

Do you care about any of the data on here? Will there be family photos, that kind of thing?

You’ll want to plan for a backup strategy for the data that you don’t want to lose.

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Thanks for the input, Yorick. I already own the Quadro RTX 5000, so I’m going to have to use it.

Great idea in regards to a motherboard with IPMI, and ECC memory.

Backup will be a challenge. I currently use Back Blaze but that will no longer be an option, I don’t think. I did see someone managed to get it working in WINE, but not sure if that would be able to work for me. I do not plan to use it for family photos but I may become intrigued by an app that I’m not currently aware of. At that point, I would really need to figure out a backup solution. What do others here use?

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My Plex media is from physical CD, DVD, Blu-ray. Backup is having the physical media and another TrueNAS server with ancient hardware (old PC that’s over 10 years, 2008 HBA and an Intel NIC) and refurbished drives as a send/recv target.

That means I don’t have it offsite, but there’s no reasonable way to backup media files offsite for me.

Pictures, documents and such are synced to cloud, and exist on the two TrueNAS servers. It’s not a lot of data, so there I can do 3-2-1.

Oh yeah for your motherboard: Prefer Intel NICs over Realtek. They are a lot more reliable, driver wise.

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