1. Storage Layout

Now, the installation of the Arr stack is not all that hard but it is important to choose a good storage layout. There are different methods each with its pros and cons. The one method that we will discuss in the setup is the Hardlink method, which basically means that the downloads and tv and movie folders are linked together instead of seen separately. That means instead of storing 2 times a movie you only store it once. But if you use HDD drives for your media (which most of us do) then this also means that downloads will use the slow HDD's instead of separate fast SSD drives. Now, if you will only use Usenet and not BitTorrent I would recommend to go down the path of a divided setup for which you can find a guide here. For now, we will follow the famous Trash Guides setup here that has only one /mnt/data:/data volume.

Inside a container, a bind mount is a filesystem boundary. Mount /mnt/data/torrents as /downloads and /mnt/data/media as /tv, and even though both live on one host disk, Sonarr sees two separate mounts and refuses to link across them. The official LinuxServer.io image documentation says this directly: using the separate /downloads and /tv paths sacrifices the ability to hardlink.

The fix is one mount. Every container that touches media gets the same single volume, /mnt/data:/data, and every path they use is a folder inside it. One mount point, one filesystem, working hardlinks.

Now, as with any application we want to utilize our fast and slow drives accordingly. In the case of a public media we choose to create an NFS share for the storage of all the media and the use of Bittorent downloads and seeding and some fast SSD's for downloading media via Usenet. In the case of Usenet you don't seed your files so you can have the download drive and storage drive separated which is not the case for Bittorent

This is also why you will not see a single /data mount or any hardlink settings in this guide. Those exist to keep a seeding torrent and its imported copy as one set of bytes on one filesystem. With Usenet you don’t need that, so the layout is simpler.

So the first step is to create an NFS share on your favorite NAS system which in our case is on TrueNas Scale. You can find how to create NFS shares in TrueNas scale here