Plex on QuTS

[ariela_nesys_it]

Hi all,

shall I install PMS on QuTS, or do I need to stay with QTS?

thanks
Andrea

[ChuckPa]

Last we looked, QuTS is slower.

At the filesystem level, it’s far more obfuscated because QNAP’s naming convention doesn’t use shared folder names; they use numbers.

If you want things ‘clean’ and faster (ZFS isn’t fast), QTS is where you want to be.

[ariela_nesys_it]

the big advantage of ZFS (as far as I understand) is the quicker way to swap a faulty hdd on raid pool. Features like compression or deduplication shouldn’t be a must for multimedia server. Perhaps more useful for virtual machines (but this is another story)

[ChuckPa]

That may be true of a normal ZFS installation – but this is QNAP. They put their own twist on ZFS.

We were disappointed when we saw it. It had such promise.

Their implementation for VMs is the same on both QuTS/QTS; a third-party VM engine.

Video files don’t compress

Replacing a drive is a Reboot on both OS’s.
You can continue to use it while it’s rebuilding
QTS is faster (the disk i/o is faster)

[ariela_nesys_it]

Consider we are talking about a TVS-h874-i5-32G with x Seagate Exos X20.

Most of the files are media files (Music, Movies, Photos, …), so not to be compressed.

Documents and VMs perhaps can take advantage of compression and deduplication, but if you say this is a “crazy” deployment of ZFS (nothing to compare to TrueNAS, just on top of my mind), perhaps better to stay on EXT4.

My biggest concern (even if, I know, it’s a bit crazy, I know) is “what happens if during the raid rebuild something wrong happens”, like another hdd dies, or stuff like that. I’m implementing RAID 6, so Murphy should look me right in the eye, but …

Still suggesting QTS, right?

edit: another point for QTS is the possibility to add online a new hdd to the pool. That should give me the possibility to start with 6 hdd instead of 8

[ChuckPa]

I agree with you: Stay on QTS as it’s nothing to compare against TrueNAS.

EXT4 will serve you well.

I WISH they offered XFS. XFS is far better suited to ‘big data’ we have now.

EXT4 volumed > 50TB are considered ‘less than optimal/safe’.

Sure, it will work but you should take the extra precautions of a good UPS dedicated to the NAS as these things need 10-15 minutes to shut down.

Re: Adding HDD to the pool.

1. If speed and space are your thing – Use a Static Volume.
   – Grabs the whole drive at creation
   – Leaves the “pool” layer out of the storage stack.

2. Yes, you can
   – add HDD on the fly to the volume
   – grow the FS to use the full volume size

3. Recommend: As you create the volume, Look for the “Advanced” settings.
   – For media use, you’ll want to make the inode size 65536. (there will still be plenty of inodes left over for small files)

I have a TVS-1282-i7-64GB w/ 8x 8TB WD Red Pro (7200 RPM)
The drives are a static volume with 65536 inode size.
RAID 5 configuration only because this is my backup server. The main is RAID 6

Here’s the performance of raw read at the outer cylinders of the drives (peak performance)

[~] # dd if=/dev/mapper/cachedev2 of=/dev/null bs=2M  count=80000
80000+0 records in
80000+0 records out
167772160000 bytes (156.3GB) copied, 142.587852 seconds, 1.1GB/s
[~] # 

The machine has 10GbE connected and it does a good job of reliably pushing 750-800 MB/sec NFS to my workstation.

Here is the main config. Notice DataVol4 is a pool (where I experiment)

DataVol1 = 2x 500GB SATA-3 SSD (mobo)
DataVol2 = 8x 8TB WD Red Pro
DataVol3 = 1x 500GB SATA-3 SSD (Plex metadata use)
DataVol4 = 1x 256 2.5" HDD (play space)

[ariela_nesys_it]

So you suggest to don’t use the entire space as a single volume (even if static)? with 6 20tb disks I’ll have around 54Tb. So better to stay below 50Tb?

Another thing. My NAS can have n.2 M.2 PCIe Gen 4, what about put two small SSD disks in raid 1 to manage the plex metadata? As caching in general can’t be helpful for me, but this solution should be good for PLex, right?

Andrea

[ChuckPa]

I’m sorry if that sounded wrong. I’m having some difficulty writing today.

• I have 8 - 8TB drives. These are a single Static Volume (DataVol2)
• I have SATA mobo M.2 ports where you have NVME

The TVS-1282 has 14 slots: (2 are internal)

• 8x 3.5" HDD slots
• 4x 2.5" HDD/SSD slots
• 2x M.2 SATA-3 slots on Mobo

Here’s my active configuration:

1. 2x 500 GB SATA-3 on mobo
   – QTS is installed here (CACHEDEV1).
   – Created as a static mirror volume.
   – * This allows me to boot QTS without ANY hard drives installed. This is really beneficial when performing initial setup and maintenance.

2. 8x 8 TB HDD in slots
   – Media is stored here (CACHEDEV2).
   – Created as a static RAID volume using all 8 drives (inode size = 65536)

3. 1x 500 GB Samsung SSD in 2.5" slot 1
   – This is where I installed Plex (and its metadata).
   – Created as a single static JBOD (525 MB/sec speed is fast enough for my work)

4. 1x 256 GB WD Laptop HDD in 2.5" slot 2
   – I “mess around” on that drive. I use it for development and testing. There isn’t anything of value on it.

My approach is based on not wanting to tear the box apart every couple years because I burned out an SSD from all my Plex work. I am very hard on equipment.

What I’m suggesting for you to consider:

1. With UPS in place and attached to the NAS

2. Use your 20TB drives as you intend (growing to 8x 20TB) RAID 6
   – Create the volume as a Static volume, RAID 6 on 6 drives initially,
   – When the RAID is ready, Format it with inode size 65536
   – Later, add drive(s) as you are ready.

3. You will be RAID 6 - That’s a huge amount of protection.

4. Don’t worry about my “50TB warning” PROVIDED you have a UPS attached to it. The problem with EXT4 is that the chains get long as volume size grows. With good UPS and RAID 6, you don’t have to worry.

5. Resultant space
   – 20 TB - 9.05% = 18.19 TiB
   – 8 drives - 2 parity = 6 Data drives
   – 18.19 * 6 = 109.14 TiB static volume before formatting
   – Formatting will use about 5% with inode size=65536
   – Approx 103.6 TiB (decimal TB is larger)

How to configure your machine. (My recommendation)

1. Put a NVME SSD (1 or 2) on the Mobo first and install QTS there
   – RAID 1 (Mirror) if you use two NVMe drives
   – STATIC volume
   – No special formatting (QTS has more small files than big files) options.
   – 512 GB is plenty unless you also want PMS there. (I would use 1TB SSDs)

2. After QTS is installed and on the NVMe drives,
   – Install the HDDs
   – Create your initial RAID 6 - 6 drive - static volume
   – Format with inode size=65536

3. Go have fun. PMS can stay on your SSDs

4. You can add a QNAP QM2-2P-384 NVMe carrier card if you want to get Plex off your system SSDs.

[ariela_nesys_it]

fantastic answer, thank you very much
Now it’s crystal clear thank you

I’ve another issue now to be managed, but it’s quite different. I have 3.2Tb of PlexMediaServer directory, and 3.1 is in /tmp (it seems I have a lot of “music-analysis-input” folder, I have a large Music library and I was trying to “normalize” the volume with the loudness feature … I’ve removed all the thumbnails, but I’ve recovered only 300 Mb)

Any suggestion?
Sorry to bother you also with this

Thanks anyway for your recommendations on NAS configuration, much appreciated

Andrea

[ChuckPa]

The stuff in /tmp is PMS not cleaning up after itself

The answer for it is lol

Before you do anything, can you show me where/how you’re computing the size of 3.2 TB ? (did you go into the shell?)

[ariela_nesys_it]

just checked the properties of “AppData” folder via DSM 7. Consider few months ago I’ve migrated from DSM 6 to 7. Value: 3.19Tb
with du -s the value is different: 3421172284
du -s in AppData/tmp: 3409571184

ls: 0038e076051815c2d6a440ba4a2fa06e.jpg006de2b67f5c6db546032bff721b14c6.jpg00 - Pastebin.com

shall I remove everything there?

[ChuckPa]

Yes, delete the JPG files from AppData/tmp

( A bit of a curve ball here. Talking QNAP and then slipping in a Syno – haha)

[ariela_nesys_it]

ahah right

shall I remove also the “music-analysis-input” folders?

[ariela_nesys_it]

well, actually I’ve disabled the sonic analysis feature (I don’t use predominantly plexamp), and also the loudness analysis feature (I’ve tagged my music with ReplayGain, it should be enough).

So I think I can remove it

[ChuckPa]

Yep… go for it.

[ariela_nesys_it]

do you think it should be possible to put the PlexMediaServer folder in the SSD, but move the /tmp into another pool? If I take 1Tb SSD for QTS and PMS, I suspect this feature will full the space very quickly.

It seems this feature is not designed correctly, imho what do you think?

Thanks anyway for everything @ChuckPa … you helped me a lot

Andrea

[ChuckPa]

are we talking about DSM or QTS ?

If you’re talking about the JPEG files, etc, that’s not design issue – that’s a bad bug

[ariela_nesys_it]

talking about what I see in DSM … and trying to avoid in QTS.

I think this feature:

https://support.plex.tv/articles/sonic-analysis-music/

needs to be implemented better. I have a big Music collection (700Gb), but this can’t create 3.2Tb extra files because of a feature, whatever feature it should be.

Does it make any sense? Do you have the possibility to raise the issue internally?

Thanks again
Andrea

[ChuckPa]

If you’ll grab the PMS DEBUG logs (ZIP file),
attach it here,

I’ll raise a new issue or attach to existing.

If you have anything which still shows what it’s doing to your system, please also link here in your next post.

I’ll collect it all up and use together

[ariela_nesys_it]

Shall I post my logs here? is that secure?