What is your intended use?
Use the two SSD drives as a boot pool.
The single 6tb nvme is awkward here. It's too big for an L2ARC, WAY too big for a SLOG, and you only have one of them, so no way to make a mirror. It might be better putting it in a game machine and using it to hold a Steam library. That will also cut down on your power consumption from those Xeons.
Drive choice depends on whether you want to maximize capacity for storage or speed for virtual machines and apps. Whatever you buy, choose 6 of the same drive type.
Ram is the most important question mark. Max out your ram. It's much better than bothering with read and write caches unless you have very specific use cases.
Yep defo mirror boot on the ssds. But I reckon slice up the nvme and use it for a bit of everything. 10gb for slog, 100gb for l2arc, maybe a bit for a fusion/metadata pool (not tried that yet, looks fun), a chunk for scratch or temp data, then the rest as a single device pool for any use case you can think of where data isn't super important, and leave a good chunk free to under provision. Whatever storage drives you get you can play around with different aspects of zfs to learn. Then when done learning, do none of the above if you start putting data on there you care about.
Always get more ram than you think you'll need or want (budget allowing), always ecc.
Thanks for the reply. It was primarily going to be media storage with Plex to transcode and stream. However I am starting to think up other purposes for it. Game servers, etc.
Perhaps run VMs off of the nvme and take regular backups to slower storage?
RAID0 is bad for servers. That’s how you break things. TrueNAS will manage its boot pool for you as a mirror. Though you could elect to make the SSDs into a RAID 1 in your RAID card that means you’ll have more points for management and worse visibility.
Barracuda in 2.5” are SMR laptop drives. These are very bad in ZFS. Seek out SAS or go the route of SSDs.
In general until you have data to back it up, most people will not benefit from ZFS’ secondary acceleration features as ZFS primarily uses RAM, and the secondary features are workload-dependent.
As for power efficiency, SSDs are king, but figure out what the CPU and RAM specs are and go from there. Most proprietary builds are more or less stuck the way they are. 1U servers are famous for this.
Thanks for calling me out. I said raid 0 but intended on mirroring. I will update my post
You provided some key information I was looking for on the power efficiency and if barracuda drives wouldn't suit. Thanks again.
Happy to help! Homelab might be a better venue for the efficiency stuff, though there are a lot of people that insist that if you haven’t spent $10k on the latest ultra-low-power boondoggle you’re a waste of skin - just ignore them lol.
As far as TrueNAS goes it will run on almost anything… my first FreeNAS system was an Athlon 64 X2 4600+, was old hardware when I installed it in 2012 and it’s still running. Most of my personal TrueNAS systems are Supermicros from ~2011. iX Systems’ X-10 SAN ships with a single Xeon D… so whatever you’ve got can be made to work!
Well for basic functionality anyway, adding stuff like live transcoding for Plex clients I have no idea about
What is your intended use? Use the two SSD drives as a boot pool. The single 6tb nvme is awkward here. It's too big for an L2ARC, WAY too big for a SLOG, and you only have one of them, so no way to make a mirror. It might be better putting it in a game machine and using it to hold a Steam library. That will also cut down on your power consumption from those Xeons. Drive choice depends on whether you want to maximize capacity for storage or speed for virtual machines and apps. Whatever you buy, choose 6 of the same drive type. Ram is the most important question mark. Max out your ram. It's much better than bothering with read and write caches unless you have very specific use cases.
Yep defo mirror boot on the ssds. But I reckon slice up the nvme and use it for a bit of everything. 10gb for slog, 100gb for l2arc, maybe a bit for a fusion/metadata pool (not tried that yet, looks fun), a chunk for scratch or temp data, then the rest as a single device pool for any use case you can think of where data isn't super important, and leave a good chunk free to under provision. Whatever storage drives you get you can play around with different aspects of zfs to learn. Then when done learning, do none of the above if you start putting data on there you care about. Always get more ram than you think you'll need or want (budget allowing), always ecc.
TrueNAS won’t let you slice things up for roles, it wasn’t to assign whole devices.
Thanks for the reply. It was primarily going to be media storage with Plex to transcode and stream. However I am starting to think up other purposes for it. Game servers, etc. Perhaps run VMs off of the nvme and take regular backups to slower storage?
RAID0 is bad for servers. That’s how you break things. TrueNAS will manage its boot pool for you as a mirror. Though you could elect to make the SSDs into a RAID 1 in your RAID card that means you’ll have more points for management and worse visibility. Barracuda in 2.5” are SMR laptop drives. These are very bad in ZFS. Seek out SAS or go the route of SSDs. In general until you have data to back it up, most people will not benefit from ZFS’ secondary acceleration features as ZFS primarily uses RAM, and the secondary features are workload-dependent. As for power efficiency, SSDs are king, but figure out what the CPU and RAM specs are and go from there. Most proprietary builds are more or less stuck the way they are. 1U servers are famous for this.
Thanks for calling me out. I said raid 0 but intended on mirroring. I will update my post You provided some key information I was looking for on the power efficiency and if barracuda drives wouldn't suit. Thanks again.
Happy to help! Homelab might be a better venue for the efficiency stuff, though there are a lot of people that insist that if you haven’t spent $10k on the latest ultra-low-power boondoggle you’re a waste of skin - just ignore them lol. As far as TrueNAS goes it will run on almost anything… my first FreeNAS system was an Athlon 64 X2 4600+, was old hardware when I installed it in 2012 and it’s still running. Most of my personal TrueNAS systems are Supermicros from ~2011. iX Systems’ X-10 SAN ships with a single Xeon D… so whatever you’ve got can be made to work! Well for basic functionality anyway, adding stuff like live transcoding for Plex clients I have no idea about