I currently have 8x14TB setup of spinning rust. It is getting full and new HDs has been quite pricey. The current setup is a mirrored raid, so 4 mirrored sets in a stripe. I have been thinking about redoing this to free up some space. Idea 1: 4 x raidz 4 x raidz stripe on top Idea 2: 8 x raidz2 …

Without all the system specifics, log (SLOG) is only helpful for sync writes. Do you have those? Usually database or NFS. Raid-Z1 isn’t recommended for large drives, like 14TB models. 4x raidz, I took this to mean Raid-Z1, 4 wide, two VDEVS. Look at the pool layout whitepaper and see what you co…

Thanks. Given the spinning rust here is what the estimate of the performance looks like. Metric 2x 4-Z1 4x 2-Mirror 8-Z2 Read Streaming 1,260 MB/s 1,680 MB/s 1,260 MB/s Write Streaming 1,260 MB/s 840 MB/s 1,260 MB/s Read IOPS 200-300 800-1,200 100-150 Write IOPS 200-300 400-600 100-15…

Raidz2 is safer. The question is what is the pool used for. If it’s just SMB/NFS shares, and you used mirrors for flexibility, go ahaed with raidz#. If you have zvols or iSCSI shares, you used mirrors for a good reason. L2ARC and SLOG are irrelevant to this discussion… but beg the question whether…

Use case matters! If you don’t need mirrored/striped datasets (see @etorix ), I suggest the Z2 for general WORM use. I run a z3 here and on a 1GbE network, the network is the gating factor. On a 10GbE connection, it’s the Z3 but then things are so zippy, I don’t really notice.

When I had a similar set, I went raidz2 for general storage/shares. As others stated, the bottleneck will be the network connection and internal performance will generally be for copying data from A to B within the NAS itself unless you are using a client to perform the operations. Raidz2 is a good …

Here’s an old video from Lawrence Systems where they did the benchmarking for the layouts for you. The major difference in performance is in random read/writes for the different layouts. [How to Layout 60 Hard Drives in a ZFS Pool & Benchmarking Performance.]

10G. System is a TrueNAS Mini X+. Clients are 1/2.5/10G. A mix of MacBook Pros (with thunderbolt dock for networking), AppleTVs, etc. In the current system I can push ~2.5G from a desktop to the NAS while moving files from local NVMe storage.

Thanks everyone for the information. I think I have the answers I need.

[image] sah: Clients are 1/2.5/10G. A mix of MacBook Pros (with thunderbolt dock for networking), AppleTVs, etc. A SLOG will help for the sync writes that Time Machine imposes. It does not have to be a fast SSD, however, I would try to use something that has power loss protection (PLP) such a…

The system is direct from TrueNAS. The SLOG and L2ARC are Micron_5300_MTFDDAK480TDS that are underprovisioned. I use to use NFS so the SLOG helped however I switched to SMB everywhere (MacOS SMB is terrible, but what can you do). The only thing the SLOG helps with now, as you pointed out is TimeMac…

Looking for a recommendation for redoing my current setup

TrueNAS General

SmallBarky August 6, 2026, 4:45pm 13

I don’t think there are any CPU / motherboard improvements to be had. I mentioned the ‘replacement MBs’ that servethehome did articles on in a different thread. More expensive replacements more trade offs for NAS use.

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Looking for a recommendation for redoing my current setup

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