Freenas: what should i use an ssd for?

I recently got a dell r310 and 4 2tb wd red drives along with the server. I have been using freenas raidz2 as the drives are used and i don’t have that much data i need backing up. The server has a sata dvd drive which i have replaced with a adapter and put an 120gb ssd in that i had laying around. However i’m not sure what is the best way too use the ssd i was reading on the freenas wiki about ZIL and i don’t think i need a write cache as i probably do 2 or 3 time more reads than writes. But a L2ARC could be use full but not having much experience with freenas idk if its would speed anything up at all. Alternely i was reading that i could use the ssd as a scratch drive for jails and for services i run such as plex. If anyone has any recommendations on what i should use the ssd for i would greatly appreciate them .

Full system specs?

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I think you’re on the right track unless you have 10Gb ethernet connected and may want a ZIL drive. As long as you have enough memory, you should be set, though.

I started running my jails from the main ZFS pool and that has proved troublesome when services go down during pool service or don’t restart automatically (awaiting volume decryption). I wish I had known and put all my VM’s and ISO’s on a separate SSD or two.

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Dell r310 12gb ecc ram, intel x3450 cpu, 4 2tb wd red drive running of the on board sata (no raid card so i can run zfs).
Just using the on board gigabit Ethernet currently, i might set link aggregation up so i can have the 2 1 gig etho ports both connected in my houses main switch but i doubt ill need that much through put. Considering i got this server for free in pretty happy with it.

Wouldn’t recommend L2ARC with that amount of RAM - Will probably do more bad than good.

If you won’t make use of SLOG then you might think about having to use the SSD for VM usage.

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