Very new to this, storage advice wanted

[Kortex]

Greetings everyone, I've just installed FreeNAS 9.3 and I have a few questions. I'm going to be using this box to store everything I have (music, movies, documents...and also will be backing the box up). I'm trying to take everything slowly and not do anything setupid. I've read some guides so far, but there is a lot of detail. So far, I've created a pool of 4x3TB drives in Raid Z2, setup gmail notification (it works) and "installed" the plex plugin. Here is what my "View Volumes" looks like (attached).

Points of Discussion :):

• Before I go any further, should I isolate the jails somehow?
  
• Would it be wise to create sep. volumes for music and movies or just throw it all on one?
• If I want to create an area (or a volume?) that only I can access, what would be the best way of going about that?

Thanks and please let me know if I should just keep reading... I really tried to read through some things but there is so much.

 

[BBarker]

It's a good idea to post your current hardware and anticipated usage for your system.

Running jails from a separate pool of SSDs is popular to help increase the speed of your media server and other applications.

You may also find that updating the plugin version of plex can be touchy. Here is a great way to install plex manually and the update process is very painless:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...all-plex-in-a-freenas-9-3-jail-updated.19412/

Creating directories within your media dataset for movies, music, tv shows, pictures and such works great. I have a "media" dataset that plex uses and a "data" dataset for backup, raw image files and other documents.

 

[Kortex]

It's a good idea to post your current hardware and anticipated usage for your system.

Running jails from a separate pool of SSDs is popular to help increase the speed of your media server and other applications.

You may also find that updating the plugin version of plex can be touchy. Here is a great way to install plex manually and the update process is very painless:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...all-plex-in-a-freenas-9-3-jail-updated.19412/

Creating directories within your media dataset for movies, music, tv shows, pictures and such works great. I have a "media" dataset that plex uses and a "data" dataset for backup, raw image files and other documents.

Concerning my hardware, cyberjock told me last year that I should just buy a FreeNAS mini. I did, but kind of regret it considering I probably could have gotten better hardware for the price. ixSystems is great but they don't really configure your device. The setup guide is ok but doesn't really explain a lot of what I'll need to know.

Would just one SSD be fine to run jails off of? 120gb SSDs are fairly cheap now. I don't really care about redundancy on jails. Is it really necessary, nice to have or recommended :)?

From what you said about plugins and datasets , I will probably re-do my device shortly. I'm going to install FreeNAS 9.10 and start fresh with a new pool. I have only put one file on the device anyway.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Would just one SSD be fine to run jails off of?

If you're going to throw money at a theoretically possible performance improvement, without even testing to see if you need it, start with RAM.

 

[BBarker]

If you're going to throw money at a theoretically possible performance improvement, without even testing to see if you need it, start with RAM.

I think the Freenas Mini comes standard build with 16gigs of RAM. The OP didn't specify if he stayed with that or upgraded. I liked the idea of using an SSD for my jails and plugins after reading up on others that had done the same.

Either way, more RAM is always good for ZFS based systems and the SSD is a nice, incremental upgrade.

 

[Kortex]

I have 16gb of RAM, the standard. I looked and a 120gb samsung SSD is $68 right now, so that's not really a huge investment. I'd love to know if it's the most ideal way to go. I want to re-do the NAS in the next day or two.

 

[pschatz100]

I have 16gb of RAM, the standard. I looked and a 120gb samsung SSD is $68 right now, so that's not really a huge investment. I'd love to know if it's the most ideal way to go. I want to re-do the NAS in the next day or two.

If all you are going to do is serve files and run an instance of Plex, then I wouldn't do anything to upgrade your hardware. Adding an SSD for Plex will show you no improvement in performance and will certainly increase the complexity of your system.

Why are you concerned about your hardware? Is there some bottleneck or performance problem? Keep it simple.

If you want to set aside some space that only you can access, then you can create a dataset on your volume and set permissions accordingly.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

start with RAM

My point is, more RAM will almost always be beneficial, across your entire workload, regardless of how you use your system. An SSD might relieve one specific bottleneck, but you won't know for sure without testing. Until your RAM is maxed out, you have a good chance of wasting time, effort and money on other upgrades.

 

[Kortex]

If all you are going to do is serve files and run an instance of Plex, then I wouldn't do anything to upgrade your hardware. Adding an SSD for Plex will show you no improvement in performance and will certainly increase the complexity of your system.

Why are you concerned about your hardware? Is there some bottleneck or performance problem? Keep it simple.

If you want to set aside some space that only you can access, then you can create a dataset on your volume and set permissions accordingly.

I do plan on doing some light torrenting. I'm not concerned about my hardware (please read the first reply to my original post). Thank you for the dataset advice.

 

[Kortex]

My point is, more RAM will almost always be beneficial, across your entire workload, regardless of how you use your system. An SSD might relieve one specific bottleneck, but you won't know for sure without testing. Until your RAM is maxed out, you have a good chance of wasting time, effort and money on other upgrades.

Great thank you. I will see how it goes. I on installing 9.10 fresh today and redoing the pool today so we'll see how it goes. Once I get a few files on there, we'll see about performance.