How to organize the pools and datasets?

[DuMbh3aD]

Hello TrueNASers,
First I want to apologize for my English (Google Translate).
I need some advice but let me walk you through my system. I have an old HP ML360 G6 with 2*Intel Xeon E5606 and 16GB RAM. I want to use it to store photos and video. For the photos (about 700GB now) I have chosen Photoprism and for the video Plex.
1 - Should TrueNAS scale OS be on SSD or not, should it be in RAID or not and how much capacity should it be?
2 - How to organize the pools and datasets? If I make one pool for ix-applications with SSD or SAS and one with HDD or SAS for movies and video and origins photos for Photoprism will it be OK?

 

[sretalla]

1 - Should TrueNAS scale OS be on SSD or not, should it be in RAID or not and how much capacity should it be?

Your experience will probably be better if it's an SSD. 32GB is enough, but you probably can't find one that small these days, so larger is fine too.

Unless you really need 24/7/365 uptime, there's no need to have mirrors/RAID for the boot pool.

I have to waste an entire drive just for booting?

With the advent of TrueNAS Scale, we seem to be getting a large number of people from the Linux community who are not quite grasping what TrueNAS is. TrueNAS is not a "Linux distro" and it is not designed to try to meet your arbitrarily spec'd...

www.truenas.com

2 - How to organize the pools and datasets? If I make one pool for ix-applications with SSD or SAS and one with HDD or SAS for movies and video and origins photos for Photoprism will it be OK?

Seems like a good plan.

 

[DuMbh3aD]

OK, I'll make one pool with 2 datasets for the photos and movies (4*1TB HDD in RAIDZ), one pool for ix-applications (3*1TB SSD in RAIDZ) and 1 SSD (about 100GB) for boot.
What if the boot disk dies? Do I need to back it up or is it enough to just export the configuration? In the event of a system install/reinstall, what will happen to the pools and datasets? Should I back up the dataset with the photos on another server?
I ask because if something happens to them the woman will divorce me and shoot me, not necessarily in that order.

 

[sretalla]

What if the boot disk dies? Do I need to back it up or is it enough to just export the configuration?

A recent config backup will do. Restoring it on a fresh/reinstalled Boot pool is easy.

In the event of a system install/reinstall, what will happen to the pools and datasets?

They are not touched by such an operation and will remain intact.

Should I back up the dataset with the photos on another server?

Most would say you should absolutely do that. Ultimately, it's your call on what backup strategy you need. The original TrueNAS pool can't be a backup of itself (snapshots and redundancy provide some kinds of data protection, but are not a backup). If you value the data you should absolutely have a backup of it.

 

[DuMbh3aD]

Thanks for the info ;)