Adding drives to the Simplest Truenas for plex use, no mirrors or redundancy desired

[justforplex]

Basic question: I want to add drives every so often to a Nas setup Im using solely for plex at home. I have backups for the movies and tv shows from the donor disks, so not really concerned with redundancy. What is the simplest pool/vdev/disk arrangement to allow for gradual adding in of new drives as space is needed?

I currently have one dataset and one pool, with one 2tb drive. The Nas software boots off a small 40gb drive I had laying around. I am now adding one more 2tb drive but unsure how to do it, exactly.

I have searched and gleaned that adding to my existing pool will work, but give me no redundancy, and Im fine with that. This isnt a professional thing, its just extra movies for home use. I dont care to dump a bunch of money into bunches of drives, etc. I did the initial setup with help of a youtube video or two, but cant find current help there anymore. Searches for adding a drive to nas dont seem to turn up much current advice (nothing in posts from older threads seems to match up to my menus and config options as nas has evolved). I realize most of you on this forum are more ambitious users, I just wanted a plex server that doesnt run off my windows machine, so I am trying this.

Figured someone here might have similar, simple needs as myself? How do you add a disk, the simple way?

 

[artlessknave]

easiest: stripe. zero redundancy. any drive fails will kill the whole pool. all files in one location. add or remove drives anytime.
easy: a pool per drive. still stripe with zero redundancy, but dead drives will only kill their own pool not everything. files are split by pool. kinda messy.
fairly easy: mirrors. add/remove drives anytime the same was as with stripe, but 1/2 (or 1/3, or 1/4) raw disk space is used for redundancy.

you can add disks right in the GUI for strpie and mirrors afaik (I havent really used mirrors since they started adding so I havent really tried it myself). I think it calls it extend or expand. functions basically the same as creating a pool.
it sounds more like you might want to consider something like unraid, which is a more consumer oriented, add disks on-the-fly, solution. ZFS's most efficient storage, raidz, is inflexible for adding disks, since you have to plan out the whole vdev, and plan to expand a vdev at a time (for your usage something like raidz1 would be perfect, except for the inability to expand disk by disk). if you dont care at all about redundancy or data integrity, ZFS is WAY overkill.

 

[justforplex]

Can I rename an existing pool once Ive thrown files onto that drive?

 

[Ericloewe]

Yes, but best not to. You'd probably be renaming things until the end of time to fix broken stuff.

 

[artlessknave]

You'd probably be renaming things until the end of time to fix broken stuff.

that's not really true, though, since you can prepare for a rename and do it correctly. for someone relatively new, however, I certainly wouldn't recommend it.

 

[sretalla]

Can I rename an existing pool once Ive thrown files onto that drive?

If your intention is to use plex, you will probably have a jail for that.

Renaming the pool where the iocage/jails dataset is will be a problem you're not likely to want.

 

[Arwen]

Most people talk about complete disk failures. Most of what I have seen on my media server, (which uses both a mirrored pool for root / OS, and an un-mirrored pool for media), is block failures. This is a bit where ZFS shines. Since I have several full backups of my media, a loss of one of my movies is non-fatal. Movies are MUCH larger files than anything else on the media pool, so more prone to failure. Easy peazy to fix. Just erase the damaged file, restore from backup.

Sure, it takes a bit of time to perform a restore. Especially on a Blu-ray rip, (I think the last failure was an 8GB file, "Back to the Future, III"). But, my media server runs probably 10 to 15watts, top.

@justforplex If I were you, I'd use 1 disk per ZFS pool. It's clumsy to manage, but does limit the full disk loss to one pool, and it's associated files. Their are some ways to "index" the media, so searching would be easier. But, it all depends on what you are going for.

 

[justforplex]

OK, I got the second disk put into the pool, but now I cant seem to create a second mount point for the plex plugin/jail. It refuses to accept any path other than the jail for the first disk; which when I tried to use that, it wont update the first pool files, and cant seem to see most of the second disk pool.

It would help if there existed a guide for setting up plex and its associated fingers...

 

[justforplex]

Do I need to add a second jail for the second pool?

 

[artlessknave]

create a second mount point for the plex plugin/jail.

what? you can only have one iocage path, as part of one pool.
if that isn't what you are trying to do, then what you just said there makes no sense to me at all.

 

[ccssid]

Make a separate dataset with a share for each pool, and point plex to the individual shares. Only have to install plex once.

 

[justforplex]

Make a separate dataset with a share for each pool, and point plex to the individual shares. Only have to install plex once.

thats exactly what Ive done, but plex itself refuses to see the files in the new pool/drive. So I reasoned I needed a corresponding mount point in truenas, and when I do that it defaults the destination path to the iocage path for the first pool/drive. Cant seem to change it and make it save.

 

[artlessknave]

your posts seem to be tending to be a word salad of unix-like words that I suspect do not mean what you intend. pools and datasets are mounted by default, therefore saying you think you need to mount it doesn't make sense.
you should probably seriously consider making a new thread and clearly explain what you are trying to do, as plex setup is different from pool setup, and you are more likely to get help from the plex enlightened in a thread with an applicable title. screenshots are pretty much infinitely useful, and I think are required at this point

 

[justforplex]

your posts are tending to be a word salad of unix-like words that I suspect do not mean what you intend. pools and datasets are mounted by default, therefore saying you think you need to mount it doesn't make sense.
you should probably seriously consider making a new thread and clearly explain what you are trying to do, as plex setup is different from pool setup, and you are more likely to get help from the plex enlightened in a thread with a good title

You do in fact have to point the plex plugin to file locations as mount points in nas. They might be by default in nas otherwise, but not with plex. I didnt realize this wasnt the forum for these questions. Disregard my question if you arent a plex user.

 

[artlessknave]

you misunderstand, I didn't say a different forum, I suggested a new thread. trying to ask multiple questions in the same thread makes it less likely people who are interested in the topic will see it, and muddles the ability to garner the attention of people able to help.

 

[artlessknave]

as an example, I answered this thread because I am interested in the hardware side, but I while I find plex and jails setup almost intuitive personally....it's confusing as #$&% to try to explain, just in text, to someone relatively inexperienced.

 

[ccssid]

maybe this will help: https://www.truenas.com/community/t...g-plex-media-server-use-multiple-pools.59466/