Hi all! I'm looking for advice on how to combine my two 12TB drives that are currently handling my Plex media. I'm not worried about redundancy or RAID since everything on them is easily replaceable; I just want to streamline my setup. They're currently mounted separately at '/mnt/media1' and '/mnt/media2', but I want them to appear as a single directory at '/mnt/media'. It's important for me to ensure that if one drive fails, I only lose the data on that specific drive—not the entire setup. I've been considering using unionfs or mergerfs. Do you think they'd work for this? Are there any major risks or downsides I should be aware of for a simple Plex library? Also, how would tools like Sonarr and Radarr handle filling these drives? Would they fill one up before starting on the other, or does it happen randomly? And if there are duplicate files on both drives, which one shows up in the merged view? Thanks for any help!
1 Answer
You might want to look into using ZFS for this. With ZFS, you can create a storage pool that merges both drives into a single virtual drive as far as your operating system is concerned. It also has great monitoring features and RAID support if you ever decide to go that route. Just a heads-up: Ubuntu has decent support for ZFS, but FreeBSD is known for having the best support if you're open to switching.
I appreciate the suggestion! Just to clarify, would using ZFS require me to format the drives first? I'm hoping to avoid that if I can.