New to this forum, but old to PC building, but new to home server building… Found my way here thanks to Wendell’s excellent Optane videos, just as I was thinking of making my own home TrueNAS server. And I thought I’d pick y’all’s brains about what I’m planning:
So, I’m building a home server mainly accessed over SMB - primarily weekly backups of the home computers (Windows, Mac), storing phone/camera pictures and videos, and assorted media. Looking to “upgrade” from a directly-attached Stablebit Drivepool to a network-attached TrueNAS.
I have the following drives and am wondering how to best make use of them (and my tentative use cases for each):
| Drives | Use case |
|---|---|
| 2x Intel Optane P1600X 118GB NVMe SSDs | ZFS Metadata Special Device? |
| 4x Samsung 860 Pro 256GB 2.5" SSDs | one for boot, one for L2ARC, and two in mirror for a fast pool? |
| 5x WD Red Plus 8TB 3.5" HDDs | main data pool in raidz1 (backed up so no need for raidz2) |
Does this sound like a plan? I have 32GB of RAM, enough ports for all 9 SATA drives thanks to an LSI HBA card (just managed to stuff everything into a tiny Jonsbo N1 case lol), and a 2.5G home network.
Other hardware:
- Motherboard : ASRock Z690M-ITX/AX
- CPU : Intel Core i5-12400
- HBA : LSI 9211-8i 6G SAS HBA
- LAN : Realtek RTL8125BG 2.5G (built-in to MB)
(Also trying to decide between Core for raidz1 write performance and Scale for all the other cool things it can do; but still got more reading to do on that decision, and I know next-to-nothing about containers.)