New to TrueNAS Scale and have some questions about Plex.

[alarsen77]

Hi,

I am new to TrueNAS Scale. I am planning to migrate my home server from Windows Server 2022 to TrueNAS. For some background the current setup is:

Dell Poweredge T440
2 x Intel Xeon Silver 4208
32gb of ram
3 x 8tb Seagate Ironwolf drives in a windows storage pool
1 x 1tb running the OS

I have plex running and one Linux Server VM that's hosting Adguard DNS

I want to move to TrueNAS Scale running off of an external USB SSD.
I plan to have another 500gb USB SSD that I will use for apps and VM's

I have all of my data backed up from my windows storage pool to an 8tb external drive.

My question is can I boot into TrueNAS Scale, setup my pool using the 3 x 8tb Ironwolf drives in a raidz1 (I know they will be wiped so will have no data on them)
So now I have a storage pool with nothing on it yet.
Can I install Plex and get it configured and running, but have it point to the external drive for it's library temporarily while the data is copying over to the data storage pool? Or am I not going to be able to use my Plex server until all of the data copies over?

 

[Arwen]

I can't comment on Plex, its something I just don't use. So I will let others touch on that subject.

...
I want to move to TrueNAS Scale running off of an external USB SSD.
I plan to have another 500gb USB SSD that I will use for apps and VM's

I have all of my data backed up from my windows storage pool to an 8tb external drive.
...

Some people use SSDs attached via an USB to SATA adapter, (or USB to NVMe adapter), for their boot pool just fine. Size wise, at least 16GBs is needed, though some people say 8GBs is usable. Depends on how many older versions of TrueNAS you want to keep as alternate boot options.

We generally don't recommend USB attached storage for data pools, (your Apps or VMs). This tends to not work well:

Why you should avoid USB attached drives for data pool disks

This subject has been coming up quite often in the last year or 2. Perhaps because of TrueNAS SCALE has brought forth some attention to TrueNAS in general and ZFS in specific. Please note that this is about USB attached storage for ZFS data...

www.truenas.com

TrueNAS SCALE or Core generally does not work well with non-ZFS backup disks. Some people want their backup disks to be exFAT or NTFS so that they can get direct access to the files from their MS-Windows desktop during a disaster recovery. Except that neither SCALE nor Core really support writing to exFAT or NTFS. They can generally import files from those 2 file systems.