Replacing Flash Drives for OS and Jails

[lakerbryant]

Hi, I have had my FreeNAS setup for quite some time now and have not really done any updates to it since it was always working. I am running 9.10 right now. I have one flash drive as a FreeNAS Boot Drive and another flash drive setup for PLEX media server and its jail (guessing this is the flash drive with all my metadata and plugin installation). I have four 6 TB drives in a Raid for my actual data. My flash drive with the PLEX stuff on it is now showing Critical Error in the alerts as well as degraded so I figured its time to replace my flash drive. My goal is to replace or redo from scratch (Not sure whats better) the flash drive for the PLEX plugin and jail as well as replace my FreeNAS boot flash drive since its old too with the latest 11.2 FreeNAS. My questions are:
Can I install FreeNAS 11.2 on another flash drive and remove my flash drive with 9.10 on it? Will it recognize my Raid volume that was setup in 9.10? Whats the best way to update the FreeNAS OS plus replacing the physical boot flash drive?
I would also want to mirror the new FreeNAS boot drive so if one ever fails I can pop in a new one and I'm good to go (if that's how boot drive mirroring works)?
Whats the best option for the degraded or failing PLEX Flash Drive? It has 8 GB of data which is most likely metadata. Make a new one from scratch after going to 11.2? Or is there another way? I tried resilvering but it was going about 0.01% every 2 minutes which was gonna take 14 days and got errors in the middle of the resilver and restarted the whole thing after 1 day.

 

[danb35]

Flash drive as in a USB stick? What possessed you to put a jail on one of those? Or on any separate device, for that matter?

Can I install FreeNAS 11.2 on another flash drive and remove my flash drive with 9.10 on it?

Yes, though it's recommended to use a SSD rather than a USB stick.

Will it recognize my Raid volume that was setup in 9.10?

Yes, presuming it's a ZFS RAID volume (if you set up the RAID inside FreeNAS, it is--but if you're using a hardware RAID controller, you're on your own). And if you save your config file from 9.10, you should be able to upload it to 11.2 and have the rest of your system configuration remain the same.

Whats the best way to update the FreeNAS OS plus replacing the physical boot flash drive?

Install to the new device(s), upload the saved config. Done.

Whats the best option for the degraded or failing PLEX Flash Drive?

After you've installed 11.2, create a new Plex jail (I'd recommend creating the jail manually, rather than using the plugin) on your data pool--there's simply no reason to put jails on a separate device. Then see what you can do to bring your old metadata in.

 

[lakerbryant]

Thanks for the quick response!
Yeah as in USB Stick. I guess my thinking behind it was my motherboard has only 6 SATA ports and I am using 4 of them for NAS Hard Drives and I left the last two incase I want to expand or add more drives in the future. I was a super beginner at FreeNAS stuff when i setup it up years ago so I followed some guide somewhere that installed the jail/plex plug in on an external device. So yeah my RAID setup is raidz1-0 created using FreeNAS. So back to the mirroring, I install FreeNAS 11.2 to two USB sticks or just one stick and do attach drive in System>Boot>Status>Attach?
And for the new Plex Jail, I'm not quite following when you say put it on my data pool? You mean on my RAID volume where all my media files are stored?

 

[danb35]

I install FreeNAS 11.2 to two USB sticks

Yes, if you insist on using USB sticks. Or just use a SSD--you can't add two disks to your pool in any useful way anyway.

And for the new Plex Jail, I'm not quite following when you say put it on my data pool? You mean on my RAID volume where all my media files are stored?

Correct.

followed some guide somewhere that installed the jail/plex plug in on an external device.

If the separate device were an SSD, this wouldn't have been a terrible idea, but it's completely unnecessary. But putting it on a USB stick? That's a pretty terrible idea--I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did.

 

[lakerbryant]

Got it. I'll grab a small SSD today and do it that way. So how do I create the jail or install the plex media server on my volume with all my media? Like I only need 10GB for all the PLEX metadata. Would running it on the raid volume with my data have any effect on transcoding for the PLEX? Maybe that's why I kept it on a separate device so its dedicated for only PLEX and transcoding for PLEX? But if its not recommended I want to get away from that and do it like the way you are saying. I see how its possible my flash drive died from a few years of transcoding and running PLEX off of.

 

[danb35]

So how do I create the jail or install the plex media server on my volume with all my media?

In the jail configuration in FreeNAS 11.2, you'll need to "activate" a pool for the jails. Choose the name of your main data pool. Then create the jail and go from there.

 

[lakerbryant]

Is this similar to making a partition on a hard drive? Sorry, I'm still getting used to the FreeNAS terminology. After I get my FreeNAS 11.2 running on my new SSD and get rid of all USB sticks and after I upload config of my saved 9.10 config, I need to:
Make a new Jail for the PLEX plugin
Install latest PLEX plugin
Mount or point the Plex Plugin/Jail to my main Raid Volume with my media on it
Is that correct or am I missing a step? and not sure if you can answer this but will this show up as a new PLEX server meaning I have to redo my entire libraries and settings for remote access, sharing, etc. all over again? Or is there a way I can grab and import my current settings that I have set already in PLEX?

 

[danb35]

See https://www.familybrown.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=fester112:jails_global and https://www.familybrown.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=fester112:jails_plex

 

[lakerbryant]

Do you happen to know about the PLEX settings? Would redoing the jail and upgrading the FREENAS to 11.2 create a new PLEX server that I need to add to my PLEX account and redo all my share and playback settings all over again?

 

[danb35]

That's where what I write earlier about:

Then see what you can do to bring your old metadata in.

...come in. It's doable, and not especially difficult, but the process varies and I don't remember all the details--though searching around here will probably find something. If you move over the metadata properly, it should look like the same server.