Seeking Advice on Movie Server Setup

[DancingShinryu]

I will be changing from UNRAID to TueNAS tomorrow and I was hoping to get some advice on what people consider a good sturdy redundancy. I currently have a 12 TB and 8 TB HDD for use and when I used QNAP, I used RAID 1 (I believe it was). I have been reading how TrueNAS has a slightly different setup with configurations and I was hoping to get some advice. I don't really want to lose too much storage space, but mirroring is really attractive and when I used QNAP, my 12 TB drive was reduced to 8 TB due to mirror. I am planning to get more disks, possibly 4-6 and should be estimate of 12 TB or more (haven't decided yet). What configuration would people suggest me to use? I am always home and we are always using the server, including alerts to allow me to know when an issue arises, so I think it's incredibly unlikely that I will ever have 2 simultaneous HDD failures. I am using Seagate Ironwolf Pro NAS Disks. I have no offline backup currently, but just purchased a Cloud storage with Crashplan and I will be getting an additional 12 TB HDD just for offline Backup.

 

[JVComputers]

A mirror is redundant, but really bare-bones protection. And, alerts, while nice to have, don't prevent drive failure. I assume you're moving to TrueNAS for better protection, not the same as what you already had, so my advice is to have at least a RAID Z1 setup with three drives. But before making a hasty jump without knowing why, you would do well to read some of the TrueNAS documentation describing the different types of drive setup and how pools are constructed and how they're not, so you're not under any false pretenses about how you'll be able to expand in the future and so you can properly plan your setup for your needs. Then, if you have more specific questions about your plan, you'll be able to get more detailed help here in the forums.

 

[Heracles]

so I think it's incredibly unlikely that I will ever have 2 simultaneous HDD failures

To have two independent HDD failures at once may be low probability, but to have ALL of the HDD failed at the same time is much higher. Fire, water, ... A single server, TrueNAS or other, can never be more than a single point of failure. As such, you always need backups for everything that you consider sensitive. See my signature for a complete backup plan.

I am planning to get more disks, possibly 4-6 and should be estimate of 12 TB or more

I will be changing from UNRAID to TueNAS tomorrow

To change a storage's topology often requires to destroy and re-create the pool. As such, wait to be ready with all your drives before doing the move. 4 drives does not offer much flexibility and you will use 50% of your capacity for redundancy. With 6 drives, you can do RaidZ2 and have 4 drives of usable space and 2 for redundancy.

 

[DancingShinryu]

To have two independent HDD failures at once may be low probability, but to have ALL of the HDD failed at the same time is much higher. Fire, water, ... A single server, TrueNAS or other, can never be more than a single point of failure. As such, you always need backups for everything that you consider sensitive. See my signature for a complete backup plan.




To change a storage's topology often requires to destroy and re-create the pool. As such, wait to be ready with all your drives before doing the move. 4 drives does not offer much flexibility and you will use 50% of your capacity for redundancy. With 6 drives, you can do RaidZ2 and have 4 drives of usable space and 2 for redundancy.

I’m happy to wait until I’ve got the other 4 drives and it won’t take me long until I’ve got them. The boot from usb made me nervous on UNRAID.

 

[Heracles]

The boot from usb made me nervous on UNRAID

Booting from USB is not recommended anymore but it is not too bad. If you can, just ensure to mirror your boot device (during the install, select both USB drive to install at once). Also, be sure to do regular backups of your config. That way, you will be safe.

 

[DancingShinryu]

Booting from USB is not recommended anymore but it is not too bad. If you can, just ensure to mirror your boot device (during the install, select both USB drive to install at once). Also, be sure to do regular backups of your config. That way, you will be safe.

I was meaning on UNRAID, the recommended way was to boot from usb. All your boot files and OS was all on usb and without it, you cannot load your server. There is a work around to boot from a SSD, but from what I read it’s installation is not as simple. With TrueNAS I can boot from usb the 1st time to install the OS onto my SSD, which will then be my boot drive. With UNRAID, your usb stick is always your boot drive.

 

[joeschmuck]

Additionally you should know how much storage space you will need. Let's say you have 8TB of data right now, then you would need a minimum of 8TB + 10% for a full healthy pool, but I recommend that you plan for the warranty period of the drives for future capacity. So if the drives have a 5 year warranty, add what you plan to store in the next 5 years. Next use a RAID Calculator to figure out how many drives you will need. So now lets assume you will add 8TB over the next 5 years which brings us up to 16TB + 10% = 18TB total. Now lets talk redundancy because this is what TrueNAS (ZFS) is known for and keeping your data safe. Since we like redundancy you need to figure out how many drives can die before your data is gone. For a RAIDZ1 it's one drive can fail and you keep your data, two drives die and your data is gone. RAIDZ2 (what I recommend) allows two drives to fail, if a third drive fails then your data is gone. Now look up one of the RAIDZ tools (two in my signature) to see what number of hard drives you will need to have a RAIDZ2 at 18TB. You can use six 6TB drives = 21.8TB of usable storage or five 8TB drives = 21.8TB or four 10TB drives = 18TB. This leads us to how many drives should a person have and the capacity. So the smaller the drive, the faster it is to "resilver" the data on the drive once it is replaced for failure. If the drive is very large and you have a fairly full capacity then it could take days to resilver a drive. During the resilver if another drive failure occurs and you have a RAIDZ1 then you loose all your data. This is a good reason to have RAIDZ2 and to have smaller drives. Now how many drives is also a factor because you may only be able to fit 4 hard drives into a case or only have 5 SATA connectors for the data drives. If you can support 8 sata connection then given our scenario I'd recommend six data drives of 6TB each and one small SSD as a boot device. This leaves you one sata connection to use for whatever is desired at a later date like a removable drive you could backup your data to periodically.

Remember one thing, the main computer you are using for TrueNAS is basically a one time purchase so buy good quality equipment. The hard drives are consumable, meaning those will likely be replaced shortly after the warranty period due to failure. Sometimes hard drives last longer by a few years but do not bank on that.

So, how much storage do you need? How many hard drives can you fit? How important do you consider your data?

I hope I didn't confuse you, it's a bit of data in a condensed format.
Good luck.

 

[ChrisRJ]

I will be changing from UNRAID to TueNAS tomorrow [..]

At the risk of being too late and/or appearing patronizing: The way you phrased your questions indicates, at least to me, that you have not spent too much time learning the various special aspects of TrueNAS.

TrueNAS, or more precisely ZFS, comes from the enterprise storage market of the 2000s. As such it has properties that are surprising to many people. So I would suggest you spend a couple of days on the forum to get a better understanding of what are about to get into. ZFS is a wonderful thing, but it has its quirks. And it would be a shame if you ended up with a setup that causes you unnecessary problems.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Booting from USB is not recommended anymore but it is not too bad. If you can, just ensure to mirror your boot device (during the install, select both USB drive to install at once). Also, be sure to do regular backups of your config. That way, you will be safe.

As far as I understand the problem is not booting from USB, but using a USB stick with its poor write endurance as boot device. Allegedly, using something like a USB-to-SATA converter with a small SSD works without problems, if SATA ports are scarce.

 

[Heracles]

but using a USB stick with its poor write endurance as boot device

Indeed, this statement is more precise...

 

[DancingShinryu]

Additionally you should know how much storage space you will need. Let's say you have 8TB of data right now, then you would need a minimum of 8TB + 10% for a full healthy pool, but I recommend that you plan for the warranty period of the drives for future capacity. So if the drives have a 5 year warranty, add what you plan to store in the next 5 years. Next use a RAID Calculator to figure out how many drives you will need. So now lets assume you will add 8TB over the next 5 years which brings us up to 16TB + 10% = 18TB total. Now lets talk redundancy because this is what TrueNAS (ZFS) is known for and keeping your data safe. Since we like redundancy you need to figure out how many drives can die before your data is gone. For a RAIDZ1 it's one drive can fail and you keep your data, two drives die and your data is gone. RAIDZ2 (what I recommend) allows two drives to fail, if a third drive fails then your data is gone. Now look up one of the RAIDZ tools (two in my signature) to see what number of hard drives you will need to have a RAIDZ2 at 18TB. You can use six 6TB drives = 21.8TB of usable storage or five 8TB drives = 21.8TB or four 10TB drives = 18TB. This leads us to how many drives should a person have and the capacity. So the smaller the drive, the faster it is to "resilver" the data on the drive once it is replaced for failure. If the drive is very large and you have a fairly full capacity then it could take days to resilver a drive. During the resilver if another drive failure occurs and you have a RAIDZ1 then you loose all your data. This is a good reason to have RAIDZ2 and to have smaller drives. Now how many drives is also a factor because you may only be able to fit 4 hard drives into a case or only have 5 SATA connectors for the data drives. If you can support 8 sata connection then given our scenario I'd recommend six data drives of 6TB each and one small SSD as a boot device. This leaves you one sata connection to use for whatever is desired at a later date like a removable drive you could backup your data to periodically.

Remember one thing, the main computer you are using for TrueNAS is basically a one time purchase so buy good quality equipment. The hard drives are consumable, meaning those will likely be replaced shortly after the warranty period due to failure. Sometimes hard drives last longer by a few years but do not bank on that.

So, how much storage do you need? How many hard drives can you fit? How important do you consider your data?

I hope I didn't confuse you, it's a bit of data in a condensed format.
Good luck.

I have just over 5 TB right now and I I think 5 TB for the next 5 years would be more than enough.

 

[DancingShinryu]

Additionally you should know how much storage space you will need. Let's say you have 8TB of data right now, then you would need a minimum of 8TB + 10% for a full healthy pool, but I recommend that you plan for the warranty period of the drives for future capacity. So if the drives have a 5 year warranty, add what you plan to store in the next 5 years. Next use a RAID Calculator to figure out how many drives you will need. So now lets assume you will add 8TB over the next 5 years which brings us up to 16TB + 10% = 18TB total. Now lets talk redundancy because this is what TrueNAS (ZFS) is known for and keeping your data safe. Since we like redundancy you need to figure out how many drives can die before your data is gone. For a RAIDZ1 it's one drive can fail and you keep your data, two drives die and your data is gone. RAIDZ2 (what I recommend) allows two drives to fail, if a third drive fails then your data is gone. Now look up one of the RAIDZ tools (two in my signature) to see what number of hard drives you will need to have a RAIDZ2 at 18TB. You can use six 6TB drives = 21.8TB of usable storage or five 8TB drives = 21.8TB or four 10TB drives = 18TB. This leads us to how many drives should a person have and the capacity. So the smaller the drive, the faster it is to "resilver" the data on the drive once it is replaced for failure. If the drive is very large and you have a fairly full capacity then it could take days to resilver a drive. During the resilver if another drive failure occurs and you have a RAIDZ1 then you loose all your data. This is a good reason to have RAIDZ2 and to have smaller drives. Now how many drives is also a factor because you may only be able to fit 4 hard drives into a case or only have 5 SATA connectors for the data drives. If you can support 8 sata connection then given our scenario I'd recommend six data drives of 6TB each and one small SSD as a boot device. This leaves you one sata connection to use for whatever is desired at a later date like a removable drive you could backup your data to periodically.

Remember one thing, the main computer you are using for TrueNAS is basically a one time purchase so buy good quality equipment. The hard drives are consumable, meaning those will likely be replaced shortly after the warranty period due to failure. Sometimes hard drives last longer by a few years but do not bank on that.

So, how much storage do you need? How many hard drives can you fit? How important do you consider your data?

I hope I didn't confuse you, it's a bit of data in a condensed format.
Good luck.

I thought that I needed 1 drive for everything. From what you have stated, it appears that I can spread my data across drives and still have redundancy. 10 TB drive should be more than enough to see me through for years ahead. I will have a look at the tool now, thank you.

 

[joeschmuck]

I thought that I needed 1 drive for everything. From what you have stated, it appears that I can spread my data across drives and still have redundancy. 10 TB drive should be more than enough to see me through for years ahead. I will have a look at the tool now, thank you.

Remember, TueNAS uses ZFS as the filing system and it's a beefy redundant system. You can't have redundancy if you use only a single drive. You can Google search for definitions of how RAIDZ works and get a better understanding. For 10 TB of storage and to just hold video content and no real important data (important data to me is financial data, family photos, etc) then a simple mirror of two 10TB drives would work but I would not recommend it. It takes a long time to resilver (rebuild the new drive) if it's that large and if a failure of the only good drive with all the data occurs, then all the data is lost. Hence why we have backups. So this is the minimum I would recommend, but this would give you about ~8TB of usable storage so you may need to go up to a larger hard drive size.

My personal (key word here is personal) preference would be four 8TB drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration = 14.6TB (usable) - 10% (1.5TB) = 13 TB of real storage space. If you drop down to 6TB drives than you are back to ~8TB of storage space with four drives. I do prefer RAIDZ2 because I can lose a drive and replace it, if a second drive fails during that replacement then all my data is still in tact. It's truly a pain in the rear to rebuild a pool and restore all your data. It's time consuming. You could reduce the pool by 1 drives in favor of a RAIDZ1 for a one drive failure tolerance if you desire.

Now lets get something clear... If you start with a three drive RAIDZ1, you cannot add another drive to make it RAIDZ2. Just as you cannot add a single drive to increase the capacity in a RAIDZ without losing the fault tolerance. If you do not understand about these things, you need to read up on them, it's important. I can't tell you how many people had a ton of data and a well configured pool and then added a single STRIPE drive to the entire thing and put it all at high risk.

Also, just to push this one last time, if you don't already have good hardware, make sure you buy good hardware. Do not half-ass it or you will likely be buying more hardware soon down the road. There is a Resource discussing hardware and if you have not already done so, I'd read it. The good thing is you can take your hard drives from one computer and place them in another computer and run it without issue. Got to love this stuff.

Last thing, make sure you do not purchase SMR drives. If you do not know what that is, Google it.

Good luck.

 

[DancingShinryu]

Remember, TueNAS uses ZFS as the filing system and it's a beefy redundant system. You can't have redundancy if you use only a single drive. You can Google search for definitions of how RAIDZ works and get a better understanding. For 10 TB of storage and to just hold video content and no real important data (important data to me is financial data, family photos, etc) then a simple mirror of two 10TB drives would work but I would not recommend it. It takes a long time to resilver (rebuild the new drive) if it's that large and if a failure of the only good drive with all the data occurs, then all the data is lost. Hence why we have backups. So this is the minimum I would recommend, but this would give you about ~8TB of usable storage so you may need to go up to a larger hard drive size.

My personal (key word here is personal) preference would be four 8TB drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration = 14.6TB (usable) - 10% (1.5TB) = 13 TB of real storage space. If you drop down to 6TB drives than you are back to ~8TB of storage space with four drives. I do prefer RAIDZ2 because I can lose a drive and replace it, if a second drive fails during that replacement then all my data is still in tact. It's truly a pain in the rear to rebuild a pool and restore all your data. It's time consuming. You could reduce the pool by 1 drives in favor of a RAIDZ1 for a one drive failure tolerance if you desire.

Now lets get something clear... If you start with a three drive RAIDZ1, you cannot add another drive to make it RAIDZ2. Just as you cannot add a single drive to increase the capacity in a RAIDZ without losing the fault tolerance. If you do not understand about these things, you need to read up on them, it's important. I can't tell you how many people had a ton of data and a well configured pool and then added a single STRIPE drive to the entire thing and put it all at high risk.

Also, just to push this one last time, if you don't already have good hardware, make sure you buy good hardware. Do not half-ass it or you will likely be buying more hardware soon down the road. There is a Resource discussing hardware and if you have not already done so, I'd read it. The good thing is you can take your hard drives from one computer and place them in another computer and run it without issue. Got to love this stuff.

Last thing, make sure you do not purchase SMR drives. If you do not know what that is, Google it.

Good luck.

I’m using a Asus Tuf B550 plus motherboard and a Ryzen 5 5600G APU. My HDD are Seagate Ironwolf Pro which are the NAS versions. I’ll be using a Samsung SSD 840 EVO for the OS drive. Thanks for all your advice. I have much research to do.