How would you set up my NAS if it were yours?

[e1m3]

Hi guys,

I've got all of these parts below & have installed TrueNAS Scale, just trying to decide on how to set it up.

It will only be used as an SMB server to store my videos, movies, music & photos (about 3TB total used & will increase very slowly over time).

Wondering if I could just have everyone's opinion on how they would like to set it up for their needs (no wrong answer), so as to give me any possible ideas that I haven't yet considered?

I also have an external USB backup, so you can assume that I have a copy of everything if the Server goes down.

Specs:
AMD 3700X
64GB DDR4 ECC
2 x 120GB SSD RAID 1 (currently boot)
2 x 2TB SSD
3 x 2TB NVME
10G Ethernet

 

[JohnDigital]

Me personally, I would sell the NVME disks and get 2 of the largest capacity spinning disks you can at minimum and mirror them.

Id continue using the small SSDs as boot.
Id run the other 2TB SSDs in mirror as some sort of app/system storage.
Then you need a data pool. You CAN use the NVMs for this but 3 is a bad number as you'll essentially be forced to run RAIDZ1 which isnt recommended anymore, but can be done with vigilance. Will yield about ~4TB of usable storage.

 

[Whattteva]

Personally, I'd do away with the 5x 2TB SSD's entirely and use the savings on big HDD's since your use case is basically just pure NAS. Also, I'd run CORE instead. ZFS will be able to really maximize use of that sweet 64 GB of RAM you have.

 

[Davvo]

Agreed, CORE is the way if you want raw performance and stability. You can also do lots of thing with jails!

The RAID1 boot drive is nice redundancy but not necessary, you can easily store your config file and import when needed. You can save money there.

If you don't already have the hardware, go for a pair of 6TB CMR HDDs, possibily with 1e-15 URE and you will be good with a single VDEV in 2-way mirror.

Example of such a disk: https://www.amazon.it/Seagate-IronWolf-Hard-disk-interno/dp/B085Z4P89R

If you want to stand with what you have, please do note that consumer SSDs tend to wear kinda fast... I'd probably go with two 2-way mirrors VDEVs, leaving out a NVMe drive for jails or maybe a hotspare: this way your future expansioin will be easier.

In my signature you can look for more infos.