Plex, Linux, File Systems, config and optimization

[Electronics Wizardy]

9 minutes ago, Josiah92 said:

Sorry you mentioned zstd instead of lz4 in another post and I forgot to ask about it.

I read here that the testing shows at level 1 lz4 has faster read speeds than anything else.

What compression levels are you recommending?

Your gonna be disk limited anyways, so the speed won't really matter. ZSTD gives better ratios, so it should actually be faster normally. Id just leave it to default for zstd.

 

WOn't really matter for media though, as its already compressed anyways.

 

12 minutes ago, Josiah92 said:

ave the server tucked away and it's everything including storage and all PMS services.

I'm hoping to keep the same ideal and run a Linux OS (sounds like TrueNAS from this post) on the system without VMs.

I'll have two system users (only me accessing it though) one for admin and one for services. Multiple plex users though.

 

Truenas isn't like, its bsd, just saying, so linux drivers and progras won't work.

 

Can you plug the server into the router directly, that will give you a good amount better performance.

 

 

[Josiah92]

Thank you for all of the great info!

3 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

TrueNAS used to be the Enterprise version of FreeNAS

I looked up and the FreeNAS sites landing page says FreeNAS is now TrueNAS core.

 

4 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

To my knowledge there isn't a way to setup GPU transcoding if you need it

While my CPU isn't powerful enough for it I also don't have GPU transcoding 

 

4 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Just install TrueNAS so you can get a web-based GUI interface for configuring everything. 

Sounds good. Still be interested in hearing pros and cons to it and other options.

I love learning about tech, so cool new features on a different OS make it worth it? Unstable OS make it not worth it???

[Josiah92]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Truenas isn't like, its bsd, just saying

TrueNAS isn't like what?

 

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

so linux drivers and progras won't work.

Like PMS services and a web browser to access it?

 

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Can you plug the server into the router directly, that will give you a good amount better performance.

LOL, sorry miscommunication there. The server is connected directly to my router (actually the switch of an AP that's connected to my router on gigabit speeds).

My bedroom TV using Roku is on WiFi and has issues streaming sometimes.

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Josiah92 said:

TrueNAS isn't like what?

OOps, Truenas isn't linux, its bsd. 

 

1 minute ago, Josiah92 said:

Like PMS services and a web browser to access it?

 

Yea plex servers work fine.

 

1 minute ago, Josiah92 said:

LOL, sorry miscommunication there. The server is connected directly to my router (actually the switch of an AP that's connected to my router on gigabit speeds).

My bedroom TV using Roku is on WiFi and has issues streaming sometimes.

Ok thats much better. That wifi link is probably your biggest issues. Peformance of the server really won't matter much here.

 

Id stil make one big zpool. You can mix drive sizes as needed with each size of disks in their own vdev. 

 

Id keep the backups external. Having them in the system ruins a good amount of the point of backups.

[Josiah92]

4 hours ago, Dedayog said:

I had no idea Plex can encode other versions for you.

 

With the Plex server in my sig, would that be smart for me to try to do?  

If you are running into bandwidth issues while streaming AND when you set your client device to a lower video/audio quality setting your server cripples due to transcoding then I would suggest taking a look at it.

OR

You'd like to limit file sizes to stave off upgrading a little longer

OR

You just want to check it out 

 

As stated, most people won't have a problem with dropping a file and then streaming it.

-Newer hardware

-Beefier hardware

-Already encoded downloads

 

I don't have any of that and my problem device has a weaker WiFi signal while also being 4K (not that I streaming 4K to it since anything over 20Mbps tanks).

[RONOTHAN##]

1 minute ago, Josiah92 said:

Sounds good. Still be interested in hearing pros and cons to it and other options.

I love learning about tech, so cool new features on a different OS make it worth it? Unstable OS make it not worth it???

For a server, the number one priority is stability. If the OS isn't stable, the server will be a nightmare and you'll grow to hate it. Because of that, you'll basically need an OS based off of RHEL (i.e. CentOS or a continuation), Debian (i.e. Ubuntu Server), or BSD (i.e. FreeBSD or TrueNAS). The commonality between all of these operating systems is that they get updates very slowly, only really ever pushing security updates until a major version gets released every 2-5 years. Because of this, the software available for these operating systems is not very up to date and you'll be missing the latest features, but you know for a fact that the software installed on the system will work with no issues (given you don't need the latest features). The main difference between each one of these is the software availability and the communities behind them. The Ubuntu and Ubuntu server community is probably the largest, and if you need a tutorial on how to do something, 10 probably exists with another 20 people there to help if you can't figure it out. The CentOS (or whatever its replacement is, I forget the name) community is also huge, but people are more expecting you know what you're doing. It's not as beginner friendly a Server OS as something like Ubuntu Server, but it's rock solid stable and once it's running, it takes either a power outage or a hardware failure to get it to stop. Granted for home use, that level of stability isn't as necessary as it is in the data center, so the still very stable Ubuntu Server is more than fine (it's what I run in basically every server VM and it's great). Plus, since both systems are GNU/Linux, the software support is identical, some software might just take more effort to get running on one than the other. Then there's FreeBSD, which is very similar to CentOS in that it takes a natural disaster to bring the machine offline, but different in the software support. For open source software and things designed to run in the data center, there will probably be a version available for both, but there are occasions that software will only be available for one of the operating systems (i.e. RedHat's KVM is only available in Linux). The community is still great for FreeBSD, so if you have issues you should be able to find a tutorial and someone to help you out, but it's still not as big as Ubuntu and people might expect you to know a little bit about the system. Since TrueNAS is based on FreeBSD, you get all the benefits of its stability without any of the pains of setup. Plus, if you want to tinker around with it, it has a full CLI so you can modify the system and use it as if it were a base FreeBSD system and install software like you would with one of those. 

 

TL:DR; TrueNAS is probably your best bet, though if you need a tool that isn't available on it like docker or RedHat's KVM, you're better off using Ubuntu Server. If you really want to get in the weeds and learn stuff, CentOS or the continuation of it after its recent EOL is a very good place to start, just be prepared to have some questions and look up a lot of tutorials.

[Josiah92]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

OOps, Truenas isn't linux, its bsd. 

I'm mostly Windows based guy (for school, for work, for volunteer, for home) so UNIX based systems pretty much become "Linux" 

Sorry, I'll try to keep them separate.

 

9 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yea plex servers work fine.

So, installing TrueNAS I can "easily" get all of the PMS service installed/running and get Edge LOL Chrome installed/running???
You got me worrying here now.

 

11 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id stil make one big zpool. You can mix drive sizes as needed with each size of disks in their own vdev. 

With my current 4x 3TB and 2x 6TB and the 8TB (I need so I can move everything off the system to redo it), you think I should do one zpool?

What configuration?

All mirror vdev - (2x 3TB, 2x 3TB, 2x 6TB)  I can only lose one of any of the mirrors, and 50% loss of space.

What about the 8TB drive?

I see that it'll look nicer as 1 storage area instead of three (though in the zpool there are three vdev instead of one per zpool.

I also see that I only need to upgrade any mirror pair to increase my storage instead of raidz2 with 6 drives I need all six replaced.

Any other Pros/Cons I'm missing? Speed benefit either way? 

 

40 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id keep the backups external. Having them in the system ruins a good amount of the point of backups.

Yes, I agree, a disaster recovery backup should be local and an offsite never in the same machine.

I'm thinking of this more as if the redundancy fails then I still have a copy quickly and easily accessible to pull the data from.

I've heard a lot about drives failing during resilvering/raid recompiling/etc.

I've ripped 300 movies and 20 seasons of shows. I'd REALLY like to not have to do it again.

 

With that out there do you have any suggestions?

8TB as a "copy" backup wouldn't be large enough as the zpool fills.

 

I guess I could also get 2+ smaller drives to transfer files off of the current server and then use in some way.

[Josiah92]

5 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Then store the other drives externally and use them as external hdds for the backup.

I kind of like this idea that the HDD aren't in use so they are like deep storage and I only bring them out when I have new media to "backup", but it also sounds like a pain since I imagine I'll be adding new media once a month or more.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Josiah92 said:

o, installing TrueNAS I can "easily" get all of the PMS service installed/running and get Edge LOL Chrome installed/running???
You got me worrying here now.

 

Yea PMS on truenas is super simple

 

3 minutes ago, Josiah92 said:

I've heard a lot about drives failing during resilvering/raid recompiling/etc.

This isn't really abig issue in my view, esp for a home server. Id stick with mirrors if you want more reliability, and it lets you mix drive sizes better too.

 

3 minutes ago, Josiah92 said:

With that out there do you have any suggestions?

8TB as a "copy" backup wouldn't be large enough as the zpool fills.

 

Could you split the backup across multiple drives? LIke have one for a-f and one for g-z for example?

 

 

[Josiah92]

5 hours ago, comander said:

1. Make sure you have a good chunk of RAM before looking into read caches (aka L2ARC). 32GB RAM or more is preferred. 

LOL, its an OLD system with 16GB of DDR3 memory.

 

5 hours ago, comander said:

2. If you do get a read cache...

5 hours ago, comander said:

The idea of ZFS caching is that it tries to keep the HDDs only reading a lot of sequential, large blocks. RAM and SSDs store small, very heavily accessed blocks. In an IOPs limited workload, having half the operations read from RAM basically doubles your performance. Having 70% triples performance or more (if a good chunk of the blocks are large). Basically RAM gets used for what it's good at (random IO), the L2ARC is used as a failover and the HDDs get used for what they're good at (cheap storage and "good enough" streaming performance). 

 

In practice a small number of blocks are VERY hot and these are almost always in RAM. After that access to a given block is far less likely. I'd guestimate that for my own use case I'd need around 50GB of ARC+L2ARC to always have a snappy system. (4x4TB in RAIDZ1). I have a hard time filling a 118GB optane L2ARC unless I REALLY relax the write speeds. ZFS does a pretty decent job of predicting things. For my games+files set up I'm hitting a ~50% ARC hit rate right after a reboot even when the ARC hasn't been warmed up yet. This is the power of the system trying to prioritize metadata (think - "where on the HDD is the next block physically stored")

Sounds like it isn't a good idea for me as AbydosOne pointed out.

 

5 hours ago, comander said:

3. LZ4 and ZSTD compression are good. atime=off is good. While ZSTD is better, you do need to think about what level of compression you're using. If you push too hard the CPU can become the limit to performance

I'm guessing with my CPU I should keep it to 1? 

 

5 hours ago, comander said:

4. Just buy ONLY 4TB or ONLY 6TB drives. Everything in one pool. You probably want "RAID10" (so mirror/stripe) or RAIDZ2 (conceptually similar to RAID6). The Mirror+stripe combination will give you higher speed and reliability at the cost of 50% storage. 

5 hours ago, comander said:

Just buy 4TB drives. A bunch of them. Make one big pool. You can get 6 or 7 drives for the cost of 4x4TB + 1x8TB. Absolute worst case scenario you're just leaving a few drives outside of the system temporarily while doing a transfer. 

 

Striping two RAIDz1 set ups could work too (so 3 + 3 drives, possibly with one hot spare)

Yeah, its been quite the conversation over on this thread of mine.

Electronics Wizardy is suggesting pretty hard over there 

 

5 hours ago, comander said:

5. If you're doing active work on a relatively small amount of stuff, you might want JUST one SSD as its own pool for active use that you copy your raw footage onto while doing work. This should be backed up regularly to the main pool.

I don't do the encoding on this machine so again I think I should just skip on it.

Just use the SSD for OS and services.

 

[Josiah92]

14 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Could you split the backup across multiple drives? LIke have one for a-f and one for g-z for example?

Yeah, that's what I was thinking at the end of the post "I guess I could also get 2+ smaller drives to transfer files off of the current server and then use in some way."

The use in "some way" could be to add another vdev after the fact right, OR...

Do a "copy" backup, because I'm again worried about having to redo the rips and encoding.

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Josiah92 said:

Yeah, that's what I was thinking at the end of the post "I guess I could also get 2+ smaller drives to transfer files off of the current server and then use in some way."

The use in "some way" could be to add another vdev after the fact right, OR...

Do a "copy" backup, because I'm again worried about having to redo the rips and encoding.

 

Yea you can easily add a vdev to a pool later on.

 

Id just copy the files to the new drives as you rip them. Seems easy, and a pretty solid backup system.

[Skiiwee29]

@Josiah92 I have merged all your threads together since they all revolve around the same topic. Please keep things in the same thread if its for the same topic.