I’m not exactly new to networking and NAS building, but I am a novice in understanding everything related to TrueNAS Scale. The purpose of my NAS is to create a PLEX server, as well as a vault for everything currently stored on MS OneDrive (photos, documents, and stored music) as I plan to eventually disengage from Microsoft entirely. I also wish to create a Minecraft server for my nephew and friends, as well as virtual machines to play around with old Windows versions (mostly for nostalgia reasons). I am also considering putting a Radeon RX 7900XTX into the system to eventually play around with a home-based AI assistant and private AI art generator.
As I am using this as a server to protect my documents and photos (critical files), I would also like to find a way to relay those files to a more secure cloud (such as ProtonDrive) as a tertiary backup (this would NOT include the PLEX server as I do not consider my movies to be critical). I would also like to make this server available to my immediate family (wife, mom, sibling).
Current hardware is as follows:
AMD Ryzen 5 5600G with Radeon Graphics (6c/12t)
(considering finding a Ryzen 9 5950X to replace)
32GB ECC RAM,
Intel ARC A310 GPU
3x 8TB NAS drives
2x 4TB SATA SSDs
2x 1TB NVMe drives
1x 128GB SSD (TrueNAS OS drive)
My idea was to use the NAS drives in a RAIDZ1 setup, the SATA SSDs mirrored as the ZFS Log, and the NVMe drives as the cache OR Meta drives.
The question is if I’ve over-engineered this setup, or if I should go in a different direction in configuring my layout. I’d appreciate any advice I can get, and and criticisms y’all may have.
Nothing you’ve written suggests that you’d get any benefit from SLOG, I don’t think there are any SATA SSDs that are suitable for that workload, and the ones you have are grossly oversized (i.e., orders of magnitude) for that task. A better use for them would be storage for VMs and any apps–they’re still probably oversized for that purpose, but at least not so grossly so.
At least double your RAM before you even think about L2ARC. Once you’ve done that, check your ARC hit ratio–if it’s consistently less than 90%, you may want to consider it.
I’d suggest adding another 8 TB spinner and using RAIDZ2 instead.
Do they expose a S3-compatible interface? If so, this should be easy to do.
Available for what purpose, and do they live with you? I assume your wife does, but if your mom and sibling don’t, and “available” means “for general file sharing” (as opposed to giving them access to your Plex server), this could be difficult to do safely.
The other idea I was considering was to use the 2x 4TB drives in a RAID1 mirror configuration to store my Steam library, VMs, App data (such as for PiHole, PLEX, etc), running a couple game servers, and for backing up my Documents, photos, and music for myself and my wife. The 4x 8TB NAS drives would then be used strictly for PLEX and for home security cam storage (a future project I’ve been seriously considering to get away from Ring).
This looks like a great configuration for SMB and Plex - but possibly a bit over-engineered if that is all you are going to run.
I run mine on a 2-core Intel Celeron J3355 with 10GB of memory which achieves 99.9% cache hot rate and can easily max out the Gb Ethernet and not break into a sweat.
I would personally counsel against using a metadata special vDev for the HDDs - it adds complexity and further points of pool failure, and for your use case may not actually do much.
But I would put the iSCSI (Steam library) onto NVMe rather than SSD because ZFS can’t do read-ahead for this, and your games will load faster.
And be sure to put your Plex metadata onto the SSDs so that the Plex client feels responsive.
