CPU Usage by Storage System

Does anyone have any leads on where I can start exploring CPU utilisation by storage systems? I’m looking at a potential processor purchase, but I have no idea if it will do the job. It’s probably overkill since my short term needs are pedestrian, but I’m also thinking of long term which basically means the possibility of expanding things to a point where the processor might start becoming a bottleneck. I was watching Linus’s video on his JBOD build and he used two Threadrippers. I doubt I’ll be approaching those levels of storage any time soon, but I would also like to make sure for example to potentially get a dual socket motherboard if long term I start approaching said limits. I would like to add some NVMe drives and I’m sure they’ll strain the system. But I have no idea which direction to go in order to make an intelligent guess about the ideal processor/motherboard.

A few questions to help narrow things down:

  • TrueNAS or custom setup?
  • Any other uses besides storage? Any VM’s or containers?
  • Will this be a virtualiztion, database, editing?
  • Is there a need for compression or de-duplication?
  • Which protocols will be use?
    • iSCSI
    • NFS
    • SMB
    • RSYNC

Well this will be my headless Ubuntu ZFS server which will do:

1.) Run all my services (nothing too crazy here, I think an average i3 would easily be able to handle my workload for the foreseeble future.
2.) As you said storage for my home with 3 users. I’ll be the primary user but mostly for backups.
3.) 2-3 VMs (1-2 Ubuntu and 1 Windows) as build servers. One project is large, takes roughly 30 mins to compile on my current i7 8700 setup.

My current train of thought is:
3 pools:
1.) RAID 10 NVMe pool for OS/Software/Services/Database
2.) RAIDZ2/3 9-12 wide for backups. Just 1 VDEV for now.
3.) Some kind of SSD pool for metadata (just found out about this today so totally clueless about potential specs).

From the top of my head, I would like to use compression but not de-duplication (don’t remember my reasoning for this one).

Probably SMB. Not too familiar with the others. Have barely looked into this at this point.

But who knows what happens to SSD prices in the future, maybe prices drop and I’ll just replace spinning rust with all NVMe with the help of some server motherboard’s PCIe slots, so that will surely eat a processor. But even normal SSDs, those ExaDrive ones, they’re still faster than spinning rust and if they come down in price, might replace spinning rust with them. Either way, I would like to plan for additional storage. I have some use cases for additional storage and a petabyte isn’t out of the question long term.

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