Background
I’ve built 3x ZFS systems now and none of them used anything more than spinning rust.
I’ve been saving up for a while now and I have everything I need to pack a Lenovo P520 Workstation to the gills. The problem is I’m not 100% sure how I should provision all the pools.
The purpose
I’m looking to de-google my life via nextcloud and run either Truenas or Ubuntu server but I’m still undecided. I need primary SSD storage for fast Truenas / Nextcloud operations and the spinning rust is for sequential backups / snapshots. I’ll need a cloudflare reverse proxy docker container as well.
The machine
At a high level the P520 has support for:
7x onboard sata
5x onboard PCI-e (mix of 4x, 8x, 16x)
2x onboard m.2 (pci-e)
My equipment
Here’s what I have:
1x HBA
6x 256GB sata SSDs (used/mixed)
5x 1.6TB intel P3600 pci-e AIC (used, 0TB written)
6x 6TB HGST SATA HDDs (used, 30,000 POHours)
2x Intel Optane P1600X 118GB (new)
Build with HBA + extra SATA SSDs
Here’s what I could do if I want to use the HBA+janky SSDs:
1x 256GB SATA SSD (boot)
4x 1.6TB intel P3600
1x HBA
6x 6TB HDST (SATA)
5x 256GB SATA SSD (HBA - slog? zil? no idea)
2x Intel Optane (Metadata special for HDDs)
Simpler build without HBA
Alternatively, I could ditch the janky SSDs and go all-in with the intel AIC’s:
1x 256GB SATA SSD (boot)
5x 1.6TB intel P3600
6x 6TB HDST (SATA)
2x Intel Optane (Metadata special for HDDs)
My thoughts
This would be my first headless machine so I’d have to pull a PCI-e drive if anything serious happens to the machine so reliability seems like a good focus.
All I really know for sure is that I think the optanes would work best in a mirror for metadata special for the HDDs. It’s just kinda scary trusting all the metadata to only 2 drives even if they are optane.
For the HDDs I’m thinking RZ2 since these are backups anyways so it would take an intel drive failing and 2+ HDDs failing for a full data loss. I could be convinced to do RZ3 though.
Open to suggestions though! I have a bit of spare budget leftover for small hardware changes if necessary.
potential vdev 1 - a
4x intel P3600 in RZ1 for truenas storage
nightly snapshots to vdev2
potential vdev 2 - a
5x SATA SSD in RZ2 for write cache
2x intel optane in mirror for metadata
6x HGST 6TB in RZ2 for bulk storage
potential vdev 1 - b
5x intel P3600 in RZ1 for truenas storage
nightly snapshots to vdev2
potential vdev 2 - b
2x intel optane in mirror for metadata
6x HGST 6TB in RZ2 for bulk storage