Could I please get a hard drive setup recommendation for my existing drives?

[RickQ]

I am trying to setup Plex on Scale. I have an i5, 4 core, 4 thread, 1 250GB SSD, 2 identical 240GB SSD's, and a 3 TB Sata drive. What would you recommend for drive and Pool configuration? Thanks for reading.

 

[JohnK]

going on the assumption that you also have a motherboard, ram etc, you could install on 250GB, and mirror two 240GB SSDs.
now that is how far as I can go without really knowing what you are trying to do with your setup.

For example, let's say you want to use plex for playing local content. Are you planning on storing the content on the SSD's or the single SATA drive? If that is the case, you can install PLEX on any UBUNTU machine and get the same zero redundancy. In other words, drive fails, everything gone.

People here generally start off wanting a place to store data with the redundancy that FreeBSD offers with data spread across multiple disks. Then they add nextcloud, plex etc as add-ons...

 

[RickQ]

going on the assumption that you also have a motherboard, ram etc, you could install on 250GB, and mirror two 240GB SSDs.
now that is how far as I can go without really knowing what you are trying to do with your setup.

For example, let's say you want to use plex for playing local content. Are you planning on storing the content on the SSD's or the single SATA drive? If that is the case, you can install PLEX on any UBUNTU machine and get the same zero redundancy. In other words, drive fails, everything gone.

People here generally start off wanting a place to store data with the redundancy that FreeBSD offers with data spread across multiple disks. Then they add nextcloud, plex etc as add-ons...

John, thanks for your reply. I forgot to mention the 32GB of Ram in an Asus Z87-C. My goal is to share media with my family, many are out of town. I plan to start with my 8GB music file and add some DVD's and see how it goes. If we use it enough, I will scale up the hardware as needed. Reinstalling Truenas is no big deal. This is sort of an experiment in progress. I will adjust the drives to fit our needs after I determine what they are. This could end up on a "real" dual CPU server if that's what we need. I have yet to install the 250GB, so I am already looking at a reinstall. I want to optimize the system to run Plex. If the CPU, Mobo works well enough, I'd likely mirror a pair of 6TB's. I bought a Plexpass In December, late January, I decided to switch from Core to Scale. At first, I had permission issues. I believe I have solved them. Now, I'm convinced my issue is with my Pool, vdev configuration, and I just want to start over. I would like to know how those more experienced would set this up, again no redundancy, just optimization. I thank you for your input.

 

[JohnK]

John, thanks for your reply. I forgot to mention the 32GB of Ram in an Asus Z87-C. My goal is to share media with my family, many are out of town. I plan to start with my 8GB music file and add some DVD's and see how it goes. If we use it enough, I will scale up the hardware as needed. Reinstalling Truenas is no big deal. This is sort of an experiment in progress. I will adjust the drives to fit our needs after I determine what they are. This could end up on a "real" dual CPU server if that's what we need. I have yet to install the 250GB, so I am already looking at a reinstall. I want to optimize the system to run Plex. If the CPU, Mobo works well enough, I'd likely mirror a pair of 6TB's. I bought a Plexpass In December, late January, I decided to switch from Core to Scale. At first, I had permission issues. I believe I have solved them. Now, I'm convinced my issue is with my Pool, vdev configuration, and I just want to start over. I would like to know how those more experienced would set this up, again no redundancy, just optimization. I thank you for your input.

In the past, I used Plex as in plug-in and ran it successfully for years on a X10SL7-F with a i3 processor and 32GB ram, transcoding for multiple devices. Though the plugin works fine, I finally decided to rather run it as VM as a dedicated Plex media server. I just found it easier to maintain.

Anyway, the i5 will be more than adequate for what you are trying to do, but where you might run into problems is non-ECC ram and a motherboard possibly not well supported. My advice would be to look at the Scale hardware recommendations. And then at the Plex hardware recommendations. You can read many posts on this forum about the trouble people have trying to use for example Realtek NICs etc. and in the end most people just go for better supported hardware.