I'm contemplating the idea of switching from TrueNAS to UNRAID and I have a few questions before I do. If you are wondering why the switch, lets just say that drives wear out a bit faster (every 3 to 5 years) on TrueNAS and I just can't keep up with that rhythm.

I have a proxmox server with Jellyfin from which I stream movies I own and they all reside on my TrueNAS server. From TrueNAS I have a NFS share that my Jellyfin server has access to. Streaming two places at the same time isn't an issue. Now I know TrueNAS is very efficient on read/writes because of ZFS but if I go with UNRAID I do not intend to continue with ZFS because it is more limiting, you have to think about VDEVs, etc.... So my question is, going UNRAID with BTRFS and sharing content from UNRAID via NFS, should I expect performance issues when streaming with Jellyfin?

I mean I sort of know the answer to all this.. Unraid reads data from one disk at a time. If we are talking of a HDD @ 5400 rpm, typically you get 100-150 MB/s read performance. And I guess the only way to maybe get better performance would be to create a ZFS pool for things that I need but then I lose the flexibility to grow that pool if I need to. Are there any other solutions I'm not thinking about?

Edited February 15Feb 15 by tessierp

46 minutes ago, tessierp said:

If we are talking of a HDD @ 5400 rpm, typically you get 100-150 mbps read performance.

I hope you meant 100-150 MB/s.

Unless you are streaming 4K media with insanely high fps rates, streaming 2 or 3 media files should not be an issue, assuming Jellyfin is running on the same server and your hardware is relatively modern and adequate.

Just now, ConnerVT said:

I hope you meant 100-150 MB/s.

Unless you are streaming 4K media with insanely high fps rates, streaming 2 or 3 media files should not be an issue, assuming Jellyfin is running on the same server and your hardware is relatively modern and adequate.

Hi there, yeah I meant MB/s, thanks for noting that I just fixed it. In my case Jellyfin is in VM on another server. I never used my NAS to host apps, they just serve files and I prefer to create VMs on Proxmox or use my Docker stack depending on the app. In this case, Jellyfin sits on a VM on a Proxmox server and Truenas is on a BARE METAL on its on but on the same network. So access to the files would have to be done through a NFS share.

As long as the hardware running Proxmox you should be fine, as far as drive file access speed.

You didn't mention your network, which is where there is more potential for bottlenecks than the drives.

I like having the media, media server and transcoding hardware all in one system, so the only data that needs to move is heading outbound from that system.

3 minutes ago, ConnerVT said:

As long as the hardware running Proxmox you should be fine, as far as drive file access speed.

You didn't mention your network, which is where there is more potential for bottlenecks than the drives.

I like having the media, media server and transcoding hardware all in one system, so the only data that needs to move is heading outbound from that system.

Network is not an issue in my case. I'm a 2.5G network with a switch have 10G ports and those particular servers are on 10G so data exchange between them is fast.. Limit would be for the clients limited to 2.5G but that is more bandwidth than a HDD can handle.

The reason why I don't have my media in one place is because I prefer to have all my files at one place there is also the cost of having two machines.

But I suspect my biggest issue would not be streaming movies but more my gitea server as I did see a lot of people having issues unless the data is put on a NVME/SSD cache pool. And investing in new SSDs at the moment with those prices would be tough.