Brand new to unRAID and could use some help

[sross44]

Hi all. I'm a complete newbie to unRAID. I did a new build today, and have a few questions. I'm not even sure if this is the right place to ask but I figured it was a starting point. 

 

1) I have two 1TB nvme drives and the cache pool is showing only 1TB. Is that because it's in a raid format? Is it better to have two sepearte cache pools? 

 

2) The reason I'm asking about the above is I want to install Plex from the App section. When installing, how do I make sure that the app and the metadata etc uses the cache pool while just keeping the media stored on the array? 

 

Please take it easy and talk to me like a dumb dumb lol. Trying to learn and setup at the same time! I need to keep the family happy with plex running! 

[trurl]

27 minutes ago, sross44 said:

cache pool is showing only 1TB. Is that because it's in a raid format?

yes

27 minutes ago, sross44 said:

Is it better to have two sepearte cache pools? 

Not necessarily. I certainly wouldn't break the raid to do that.

 

28 minutes ago, sross44 said:

When installing, how do I make sure that the app and the metadata etc uses the cache pool while just keeping the media stored on the array? 

Set the default shares to cache:prefer (or only) and all other shares to cache:yes (or no)

https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Shares#Default_Shares

https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Shares#Use_Cache_.28and_Mover_Behavior_with_User_Shares.29

 

[apandey]

30 minutes ago, sross44 said:

1) I have two 1TB nvme drives and the cache pool is showing only 1TB. Is that because it's in a raid format? Is it better to have two sepearte cache pools? 

 

yes, it is most likely a BTRFS RAID1 pool, with 1 disk redundancy. You can confirm by clicking the cache drive settings in Main tab in unraid UI. Under balance status, it would say filesystem type

 

as for what is better, it depends on your usage. If you prefer 2 separate independent pools without any drive redundancy, thats fine too

 

34 minutes ago, sross44 said:

2) The reason I'm asking about the above is I want to install Plex from the App section. When installing, how do I make sure that the app and the metadata etc uses the cache pool while just keeping the media stored on the array? 

simplest is to make appdata as a cache "only" (see share settings) share. or create a separate cache "only" share and point plex container metadata mount point to it

 

if above terms are new to you, read the respective parts of unraid manual and ask more questions here