New here what changes would you make?

[jarble]

So first off I am new to the whole truenas world and am learning a ton reading up here and there. I went a bit crazy recently and decided to build a server to house my media. I have never had the luxury of parity on my data as I have always needed to run with maximum storage but this build I wanted to do things "right". I scooped up a supermicro 3U chassis off of ebay and tossed in some old hardware I had laying about (x399, 19050x, 64GB memory). I also grabbed 16 16TB drives and an LSI 9400 to round out the build.

I was pleasantly surprised that the build itself went smoothly with truenas core installing no problem and the pool building with raidz2 no fuss. I have begun tinkering with the software (plugins/jails are all new to me) and overall I am quite happy. So my question is before I move on from testing and lock everything in what changes would you make in my shoes?

 

[Arwen]

Well, it would be helpful to describe your pool layout. Using all 16 disks in a single ZFS RAID-Z2 vDev, (aka Virtual Disk), is not recommended. Usually 12 is the absolute top width suggested.

Now if you have 2 x 8 disk RAID-Z2, that is okay. You loose more to parity but will have less future problems.

 

[Davvo]

For your health don't go plug-ins, go jails.

 

[jarble]

Well, it would be helpful to describe your pool layout. Using all 16 disks in a single ZFS RAID-Z2 vDev, (aka Virtual Disk), is not recommended. Usually 12 is the absolute top width suggested.

Now if you have 2 x 8 disk RAID-Z2, that is okay. You loose more to parity but will have less future problems.

Ahh I did not know that. I have them all in one wide vDev.

 

[danb35]

For your health don't go plug-ins, go jails.

Agreed. And it isn't just random folks here who say so, it's iX themselves:

iXsystems, when are you going to stop pretending that CORE has (usable) plugins?

Plugins are broken. We all know it, and you have no intention of fixing them. Most notably, @Kris Moore has said not to use them, and that they're "more or less deprecated": using plugins on CORE is a path to sadness. The plugin system is more or less deprecated and as you can tell, somewhat...

www.truenas.com

Fortunately, some amazingly brilliant (and totally humble) member of this forum has come up with an alternative to the Plex plugin that's almost as easy to install, and much more maintainable:

Scripted Plex installation

Yes, it's another of my scripted jail installations, this time for Plex Media Server. It puts metadata outside the jail, uses the latest packages, and automatically updates every week. See...

www.truenas.com

 

[jarble]

Thanks for all the kind input. I am in the process of reading up on better ways to configure my drives.

 

[Davvo]

This might help.

ZFS Storage Pool Layout

This amazing document, created by iXsystems in February 2022 as a "White Paper", cleanly explains how to qualify pool performance touching briefly on how ZFS stores data and presents the advantages, performance and disadvantages of each pool...

www.truenas.com

 

[geezermew]

This might help.

ZFS Storage Pool Layout

This amazing document, created by iXsystems in February 2022 as a "White Paper", cleanly explains how to qualify pool performance touching briefly on how ZFS stores data and presents the advantages, performance and disadvantages of each pool...

www.truenas.com

basket random

Oh it's useful for me.