Chassis max 6 drives, only need 4 for setup, 2 free drives, caching?

[galorin]

Ok, here's my planned setup, going into a 1U chassis that takes 6x2.5" drives.I have four drives to set up in RAID-Z, giving me the capacity we need. We're a small shop with less than a terabyte on our flagging ReadyNAS 1100. What should I focus the two remaining drives on, as we don't need more capacity. I tried (In a VM) setting up 4x drives, 1x cache and 1x log, and got a warning recommending the use of more than one log drive. Why is this, and what problems would there be in using one cache and one log in production?

We're a fairly typical office, with pretty average metrics. Only one in-house app that does a lot of small network transactions, trying to fix for next major revision. Most complaints of slowness come from opening files, not so much saving.

 

[Brand]

If this is going to house critical production data in an office environment you should use nothing less than RAIDZ2.

 

[galorin]

I am reaching target capacity with 5x drives in RAIDZ2, leaving one spare bay. Next big question then is cache, or spare in the last bay?

 

[fennerinium]

considering that hotspare functionality doesnt work, i'd go with a cache disk (but that's after i upgraded to raidz2). not really sure how much good a cache disk is going to do in such a lightweight scenario though. as far as the spare goes, just keep the extra disk locked away somewhere in the office.