TrueNAS first time

[_nemanja_]

Well, I decided to turn my old PC into media server, so I have a few questions.
My old PC is Core i5-750, 8 GB RAM, RADEON 5850, 1 TB WD black HDD + 2 TB Seagate HDD. I plan to buy 512GB SSD for boot drive and TrueNAS.

1. Since I'm only gonna run Plex on it, so I can watch movies and tv shows on my smart tv, what would be the best configuration (pool)?
2. Is there a way to make my new SSD as cache, so when I start a movie/tv show, it goes from HDD to SSD and then to plex?
3. If not, is there a way I can put newest movies/tv shows on SSD, and when Im done with them to push them to HDD for storage?
4. Is it possible to turn on/off that TrueNAS PC with android phone?
5. When creating a pool, can I add HDD to it after its already created? Because I already have a lot of media on my HDDs, and for TrueNAS I'd have to format them to ZFS, so, I could rearange media from one HDD to another to make all this.
6. Can you add external passport HDDs to pool, and remove them when needed?
7. Can ZFS formated passports work on other PCs and smart TV?

 

[jgreco]

Core i5-750, 8 GB RAM

only gonna run Plex on it,

That's unlikely to work well. 8GB RAM is the bare minimum for TrueNAS CORE itself; if you plan to run other stuff, especially something like Plex that has large executables and maintains databases, you should try for more. Lynnfield supports up to 16GB RAM, and it'll be DDR3/1066 or 1333 that's cheap on the used market.

2. Is there a way to make my new SSD as cache, so when I start a movie/tv show, it goes from HDD to SSD and then to plex?

No.

3. If not, is there a way I can put newest movies/tv shows on SSD, and when Im done with them to push them to HDD for storage?

You can script that, possibly. But why? HDD is fine for media storage. You do not need the speed of SSD for sequential file reads of media files.

4. Is it possible to turn on/off that TrueNAS PC with android phone?

Possibly. You can certainly turn it off with an SSH client hooked into an authorized_key that runs a shutdown command. Turning it on would require IPMI or working WOL support.

5. When creating a pool, can I add HDD to it after its already created?

Yes, but you might not want to do that in light of following questions.

6. Can you add external passport HDDs to pool, and remove them when needed?

No. Once you add a vdev to a pool, it must remain part of the pool. You can, however, have multiple pools, perhaps using each drive as a separate pool. Plex is fine with specifying multiple directories for a library, so this means you can draw content from multiple disks if each one is set up as a pool. This gives you no redundancy, of course.

7. Can ZFS formated passports work on other PCs and smart TV?

Can they? They could. Will they? No. ZFS is an onerous filesystem to support, and PC's and TV's generally do not support it. Usually you need something like FAT or maybe NTFS, which are commonly supported filesystems.