I am building a DIY NAS for my small business.
The main objective of the NAS is for employees to backup media files (photos/videos/documents) and be able to access them quickly.
My hardware list is as follows
CPU: Amd Ryzen 5 4600G
RAM: 32 GB
HDD: 3x 4TB Ironwolf Pro
2.5’’ SSD: 1x 240GB
M.2 SSD: 1x 250GB
I will use the 3 HDD’s to create a storage pool.
What drive should I use as a boot drive between the 2.5’’ and the M.2?
Could one of the two SSD’s be used as a level 2 cache?
Would that even make sense?
Stux
2
Really depends on the specs of the two SSDs.
Do you know what they are?
I’d probably use the sata SSD as the boot drive.
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The M.2 is a Kingston NV2 Gen 4x4 NVMe PCIe with rated read/write speeds of 3500/2800 MB/s
The 2.5" is a Kingston A400 SATA Rev. 3.0 with rated read/write speeds of 500/450 MB/s
etorix
4
With few drives it really doesn’t matter where to boot from. My preference generally goes to a NVMe drive, to spare a SATA port for data.
As for L2ARC, you should first use the system for some time and then run arc_summary to see whether a L2ARC could be of use.
MBILC
5
General rule is more system ram before a L2ARC device (starting around 64GB of ram first before considering a L2ARC)
Stux
6
IIRC, Optimizations were made to L2ARC tables when persistent L2ARC was developed, lowering the memory requirements.
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