How best to set up my drives?

[tawnytim]

Coming from Synology, which can take different sized drives and make it all work. The RaidZ and vdev pools confuse the heck out of me so I wanted to ask some advice before making the jump to Truenas core.

My drive inventory is:

• 2x 10TB
• 2x 6TB
• 5x 4TB

What I'm doing is I've got a nice little tower containing a 10700k, and on this tower, I've got ProxMox installed, which has 2 VMS, TrueNAS and Ubuntu Server. The Ubuntu VM will run all of my media stack, like Jellyfin, the Arrs, etc... TrueNAS will obviously keep my data situated. This server will be used exclusively to serve up media for TV consumption.

So, I'm confused as to how to work with these drives. The 4TB drives seem almost silly in a world where 10+TB drives are very accessible. Can I do something meaningful with the 2x 10TB and 2x 6TB? I'm so lost on storage pools with TrueNAS. I'd like to have maximum capacity, but then I also want redundancy, so... have my cake and eat it. What should I do? Just buy more drives?

 

[ChrisRJ]

The bigger issue is how to connect the disks to the VM. Please read

Resource - "Absolutely must virtualize TrueNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.

[---- 2024/01/16: Still relevant. Virtualization really doesn't change much. Updates made as appropriate. ----] [---- 2018/02/27: This is still as relevant as ever. As PCIe-Passthru has matured, fewer problems are reported. I've updated some...

www.truenas.com

For your question about ZFS this should help you

Introduction to ZFS

This is a short introduction to ZFS. It is really only intended to convey the bare minimum knowledge needed to start diving into ZFS and is in no way meant to cut Michael W. Lucas' and Allan Jude's book income. It is a bit of a spiritual...

www.truenas.com

 

[ChrisRJ]

What makes you lean towards TrueNAS and not unRAID, which in my understanding is closer to Synology?

 

[tawnytim]

What makes you lean towards TrueNAS and not unRAID, which in my understanding is closer to Synology?

Thanks for the links Chris! So actually I have an unRAID server too. unRAID is ok, but I dislike the VM implementation of it. Actually there are a great many things I dislike about unRAID. I set up a freenas box at my office(with only one drive) just to test it out and it seems simple and makes sense. The more I'm thinking about this though, it almost feels like I'm doing this for no reason. I mean, the Synology is OK, but it's just mediocre hardware at best, which I dislike. My unRAID server however has a Ryzen 5950X CPU and is a powerhouse. I didn't realize at the time I built it that the 5950X didn't have a worthwhile means of hardware transcoding for the likes of PLEX and such. So, I have another PC here which has a 10700K that I hear works incredibly well for this purpose. So, I was going to just redo everything using the 10700K machine when the idea hit me that maybe now would be a good time to dump unRAID AND Synology, and just roll with trueNAS and a Linux server.

 

[ChrisRJ]

In that case you should really understand the limitations that ZFS imposes relative to unRAID. If you haven't done so yet, please do read the ZFS introduction. And beware of YouTube videos about TrueNAS. Most of them are rubbish and Lawrence Systems is the only exception I personally know.