Basic home storage server tiering help

[BlueScope819]

Hello all,

I'm looking to set up a FreeNAS server, I already bought the parts. It's going to be used for photos. Long term storage. However, for frequently used stuff, and dumping data to it all at once, I wanted a SSD. I have a 120 GB SSD, and a array of hard drives that I found basically lying around. 2.5 inch, 3.5 inch. All below 1 TB. I'm looking to set it up in such a way that with tiering, the SSD acts like a cache. Because I basically found the drives on the side of the road, I also want to make sure that if one of the drives fail, no data is lost. I have no idea where to even begin besides installing the FreeNAS OS on the server and poking around in the settings and I thought I could use some advice. Whats the best and easiest way to go about this?

EDIT: I just finished picking out the drives i'm going to use and it looks like 2 500GB drives, 1 250 GB drive, and 1 120GB SSD. Can you still do redundancy with 3 drives? Which one should I use?

 

[garm]

Start by reading the manual

 

[BlueScope819]

Ok, what manual?

 

[HoneyBadger]

Ok, what manual?

https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/11.2/

Although I'll give you a brief note here: ZFS is not designed to take a bunch of dissimilar disks, smash them together, and present a single volume. You can't do any redundancy beyond a mirror of 2x500GB with the drives you have, and the SSD will not do what you expect either.