After about a year of playing with freenas, I have decided to build a new server and use Unraid and zfs due to the ease of configuration compared to freenas. I will also be setting up a virtual machine for light gaming once I get everything sorted on the server…
My OLD server is a supermicro 36 bay dual AMD 4U server. it has been running Freenas with plex and all the typical downloading / handling apps in jails. The disk configuration is (2) 6 disk (8tb) raidz2 vdevs. It is full of content (about 2 tb left).
New server is:
Fractal Define 7xl case
I9-9900 cpu
64 gigs ram (go to 128 if i can)
10x 10TB WD reds
dual 10g ethernet ports
Other hardware I have kicking around includes a 500g and 1tb nvme drives, 1tb sata SSD, 2tb sata SSD, multiple 2.5" laptop and shucked external drives.
This is what I am thinking of doing:
10x 10tb drives in RaidZ1 (used for general storage)
2x 4tb 2.5" shucked seagate external drives, striped - used as initial download drive
500g nvme - cache drive for main pool
1tb nvme - special drive for main pool ( plan on adding at least one stripe)
1tb sata SSD - log drive
I dont have much for outside streamers. i use it myself when away from home, and have two other people that stream remotely. my upload speed is limited so I have plex set so transcode to 2mb/sec. The i9 igpu handles the transcodes with no effort.
My main goal is to have plex load up faster at home and display stuff quicker, and reduce the spinning circle when searching or navigating the menus. secondary goal is to have lots of storage. My current pool on the old server is kinda fragmented and I intend on letting the new server rebuild the library. Once it is rebuilt I will have the 12x 8tb disks from the old server to utilize…
What else should I be looking at to improve performance??