Hey everyone,
I've been a FreeNAS user for about 4 years... Since the beginning of FreeNAS 9. I've always loved the software and I've run it on a few different boxes as my storage needs have grown.
I'm currently running Corral on a Dell R710 with 5x4TB drives in RaidZ1. Two Xeon X5670s and 96GB of ram. I also have a Samsung 250GB 960 Evo as an L2ARC and a 300GB 15k spinner for the secondary VMs
It runs Plex, PlexPy, UniFi controller, Smokeping, Crashplan and Syncthing.
I need relatively high performance (it has a 10Gig nic so I would like to get read and write performance over 1Gig).
I need to be able to run my existing applications and would like an easy path to installing new ones.
I'm thinking about Server Essentials 2016... But you need two NVME drives to do caching right? From what I've read using parity with ReFS has awful writes...so unless I wanna deal with 30MBPS writes I need to use NVME caching.
As for unRAID, I'm not really sure I like how the RAID system works. I don't like how all parity is stored on one disk. I understand that RAID Z1 doesn't offer any additional protection from disk loss, but the fact that it stripes parity across all the drives makes me feel better. And ZFS ARC and L2ARC seem to be a better caching system than just using an SSD as a cache. (Same qualm with ReFS in storage spaces)
And that brings me to FreeNAS 11... Docker isn't here yet. So if I stay with FreeNAS I will probably need to spin up ESXI and have that up to make VMs... And just run Plex in a jail.
@wendell maybe you can comment.. I know you guys are running a similar setup for Level1.
Thoughts?
Nick