Help on how best to allocate current storage hardware for New FreeNAS Installation: TIA

[p_funk_era]

The current FreeNAS Server I put together is to be used for local image based (Processed by Veeam Backup and Recovery on a separate machine) backup storage for the One Physical Windows Server. It will then be replicated to the Backblaze B2 Cloud, and then to a third backup repository on the parent company's backup infrastructure.

I installed FreeNAS 11.3-U41 on a Dell Precision T3600 Xeon Workstation, and was hoping someone could advise me on how best to allocate my storage setup for the hardware I'm currently working with.

Here are the Specs on the Dell T3600 Workstation:
Stock Intel C600 Chipset/Motherboard
Xeon E5-1607 CPU
8GB DDR3 Non ECC Ram

Installed FreeNAS 11.3 U41 OS in a (2) drive mirror to:

(2) New 32GB SanDisk Ultra USB Flash Drives

My HDD/SSD Storage Hardware consists of:

(2) New 4TB Seagate IronWolf NAS Internal Hard Drives HDD – CMR 3.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s 5900 RPM 64MB Cache attached to HDD0 and HDD2 Onboard SAS Ports
(1) Used-Very Good 480GB SanDisk SATA SSD attached to a Onboard Sata Port
(1) Used-Very Good 250GB Samsung Evo 970 NVME PCIe M.2 SSD attached to the PCIe X16 Slot

Any advice on possible storage device allocations and or OS configuration for what I'm working with is greatly appreciated.
TIA

FreeNAS 11.3-U4 on Dell T3600 Workstation:
Intel C600 Chipset/Stock Motherboard
Xeon E5-1607 CPU
8GB DDR3 1600 MHz Ram
2 - 32GB Sandisk Ultra USB Flash Drives for OS
2 - 4TB Seagate IronWolf NAS CMR HDDs 5900RPM 64MB Cache??
1 - 480GB Sandisk SATA SSD Plus??
1 - 250GB Samsung Evo 970 NVME M.2 PCIe SSD??

 

[Spearfoot]

Welcome to the forum!

With just a pair of 4TB hard drives, your only real option is to configure them as a mirrored pool. This will give you 4TB (~3.64TiB) of redundant storage, less overhead.

ZFS is a copy-on-write file system and needs empty space to work well, so you shouldn't plan on using more than 50-60% of that capability.

Your system is short on RAM -- and ZFS needs RAM -- but should work fine as simple backup storage with roughly 1.5TiB of usable space.

I don't recommend using one of your SSDs as an L2ARC cache device. The general rule of thumb is to max out system memory before adding an L2ARC device. With so little RAM, an L2ARC device is more likely to hurt rather than help, as it takes memory to administer the cache itself.

You could configure the two SSDs as a second, faster mirrored pool, but this pool would be limited by the size of the smallest SSD (250GB). Not sure how much use this would be to you.

Good luck!

 

[p_funk_era]

Thank You.
Yes , that's exactly where I was going with putting the ssds in, thinking I could use one as a L2ARC cache device. Do you think I would be better off using the ssds as the boot device in a mirrored pair? I realize I would lose out on 250GB but thinking they might last longer with all the logs, etc writing to them constantly. Or keep the cheaper (but new) Sandisk Ultra 32GB USB Flash Drives for boot. I was thinking the ssds might be be a better choice, and see the community is pretty much split 50/50 on whether to use use the cheaper flash drives or ssds for the boot device.

 

[Spearfoot]

Thank You.
Yes , that's exactly where I was going with putting the ssds in, thinking I could use one as a L2ARC cache device. Do you think I would be better off using the ssds as the boot device in a mirrored pair? I realize I would lose out on 250GB but thinking they might last longer with all the logs, etc writing to them constantly. Or keep the cheaper (but new) Sandisk Ultra 32GB USB Flash Drives for boot. I was thinking the ssds might be be a better choice, and see the community is pretty much split 50/50 on whether to use use the cheaper flash drives or ssds for the boot device.

You're very welcome.

If it were my system, I would use the smaller SSD for a boot device, because SSDs are more reliable than USB drives. Mirroring two of them is up to you; FreeNAS is very easy to re-install, provided you keep backups of your system configuration.