Small upgrade/refurbish

[Spoon]

I'm looking currently to do a small refresh on my home NAS. Currently, it is running ESXi with 2 Virtual machines. 1x UBMT and 1x Server 2012 R2. Windows has the HDD passed through and the is using RAIDX.

My objectives are as follows:
-Install a 10gb NIC
-Have FreeNAS run on bear-metal
-Have one virtual machine running UBMT (based on Ubuntu, consumes 2gb ram and 16gb HDD, not resource intensive and manages 2x switches)
-Have FreeNAS run as an NTP/PTP server
-Have 1x Time machine and 1x general storage/file backup for windows

System Currently:
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz
HP Microserver Gen8
16GB ECC RAM (2x 8GB DDR3-1600)
4x WesternDigital RED 4TB

What I'd like to Add:
Solarflare SFN5322FL (10Gb NIC)
BU-353S4 (USB GPS Reciever) for time
2x SanDisk 32GB USB or 1x 120gb Intel SSD for boot.

As a possible extra, I was thinking of replacing the HDDs for SSDs
4 or 5 (1/2TB WesternDigital Blue SSD)

I plan to use no SLOG or L2ARC. I will use RAIDZ2 if 4 drives or RAIDZ3 if 5.

So my questions are as follows:

Has anyone had any issues with the Solarflare NIC? They are apparently supported by Solarflare on BSD. Do I need to install the latest drivers or should it work out of the box?

Should I install on a 2xUSB drive or switch to 1xSSD? The SSD is oldish whilst the USB's are brand new?

Has anyone come across issues with the WesternDigital Blue SSD's?

Has anyone got a similar setup and if so do you have a rough read/write speed I should be achieving?

Have I missed anything?

I plan on using the onboard control in simple mode. I'm aware this isn't great, but I need the oscillator on the NIC for the PTP if it is ever to work.

 

[sretalla]

Should I install on a 2xUSB drive or switch to 1xSSD? The SSD is oldish whilst the USB's are brand new?

SSD is better. If the USBs are USB3, there is a tendency to overheat and fail quite quickly and will often be close together if in mirror, so providing no real advantage. just make sure you take a config backup occasionally and the SSD will be good.

Has anyone come across issues with the WesternDigital Blue SSD's?

I had issues with the WD green SSDs as a boot drive... I keep saying the wrong thing about that, but there was something to do with the 3D NAND and/or the marvell controller... not sure what it was without needing to go searching, but I don't think it's necessarily fixed. Not sure if that applies to those Blue ones too.

 

[Spoon]

Thought I would just add to this post in case someone searches for NIC compatibility. I can confirm that the Solarflare SFN5322FL (10Gb NIC) works with FreeNAS-11.2-U3 no issues so far. I'm using a FibreStore DAC (Cisco compatible) and a C3560CX switch at the other end. The base unit is a HP Microserver Gen8. I did have to update the firmware on it to the latest 6.xx