Hi, my name is Jerry and I am retired from a nearly 50 year IT career that involved doing a wide variety of things. Last 20 years was largely specialized in security. Wrote my first computer program in 1967.
So much for the elevator talk. My current project is to replace an aging Windows, hardware based RAID6 array. Set a hardware budget of about $1k plus storage devices. Started out looking at a new hardware RAID6 array, then commercial NAS boxes and finally ended up going with a DIY TrueNAS build. Surfing the Black Friday deals, here is what I ended up with.
Intel i9-12900K
ASUS Z790-V Prime
64GB DDR5
3 x 500GB NVMe
11 x 18TB WD Red Pro drives (now wish I had 5400 RPM drives but got these when I was still thinking hardware RAID)
4 x LSI 9207-8i HBAs (2 spares on the shelf, they were cheap)
Reusing an old case with 15 drive bays and 750w power supply
TrueNAS Scale is up and running with some old hard drives just to get some hands-on experience. I have spent hours reading articles and forum posts to get everything working and successfully running PLEX with hardware transcoding. Here is what I am thinking as a final drive configuration.
2 mirrored 500GB NVMe boot pool. Yes, I know the size is way over kill but it is hard to find smaller fast NVMe drives these days.
1 zpool
vdev with 8 WD drives in raidz2 to be used for mostly write once files. Photos, video, music.
vdev with 2 WD drives mirrored to be used for everything else including photo and video processing work flows.
500GB NVMe l2arc
1 WD hot spare
As an alternative I could do 2 zpools. One for the 8 drive raidz2 array and one for the 2 drive mirror with the l2arc. It is my understanding (could be wrong) that l2arc is specific to a zpool so this config would isolate it from the finished video, photo, and music files. Down side is that with this pool configuration the spare drive would sit on the shelf. That way it could be used for a failure in either of the two zpools.
Thoughts? Recommendations? Much easier to change now than after the pools are built. Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this and for any feedback.
So much for the elevator talk. My current project is to replace an aging Windows, hardware based RAID6 array. Set a hardware budget of about $1k plus storage devices. Started out looking at a new hardware RAID6 array, then commercial NAS boxes and finally ended up going with a DIY TrueNAS build. Surfing the Black Friday deals, here is what I ended up with.
Intel i9-12900K
ASUS Z790-V Prime
64GB DDR5
3 x 500GB NVMe
11 x 18TB WD Red Pro drives (now wish I had 5400 RPM drives but got these when I was still thinking hardware RAID)
4 x LSI 9207-8i HBAs (2 spares on the shelf, they were cheap)
Reusing an old case with 15 drive bays and 750w power supply
TrueNAS Scale is up and running with some old hard drives just to get some hands-on experience. I have spent hours reading articles and forum posts to get everything working and successfully running PLEX with hardware transcoding. Here is what I am thinking as a final drive configuration.
2 mirrored 500GB NVMe boot pool. Yes, I know the size is way over kill but it is hard to find smaller fast NVMe drives these days.
1 zpool
vdev with 8 WD drives in raidz2 to be used for mostly write once files. Photos, video, music.
vdev with 2 WD drives mirrored to be used for everything else including photo and video processing work flows.
500GB NVMe l2arc
1 WD hot spare
As an alternative I could do 2 zpools. One for the 8 drive raidz2 array and one for the 2 drive mirror with the l2arc. It is my understanding (could be wrong) that l2arc is specific to a zpool so this config would isolate it from the finished video, photo, and music files. Down side is that with this pool configuration the spare drive would sit on the shelf. That way it could be used for a failure in either of the two zpools.
Thoughts? Recommendations? Much easier to change now than after the pools are built. Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this and for any feedback.