System I5-9500. 64 GB DDR4 memory. 10 GB PCIE card.
3 x 22 TB drives HDD
4 x 8 TB drives HDD
Looking for straight speed. No resiliency necessary. Mainly torrent and plex storage
Options:
1 pool - 2 Vdevs (3x22) (4x8)
1 pool mirrored all 7 drives (2 vdevs? 3 vdevs?)
1 pool striped all 7 drives
Suggestions? Thank you
The key thing to remember about a non-redundant pool is that you lose the entire pool if ANY of the disks fail - so the more disks in the pool, the more likely it is to fail completely. A single striped pool of 98TB across 7 disks is a LOT of data to lose with 7x the likelihood of failure cf. a single drive.
My advice would be to have redundancy, and to create a single pool consisting of 2 RAIDZ1 vDevs - A) 3x22TB which gives you 44TB of space and B) 4x8TB which gives you another 24TB of space.
In reality, in total you would probably get about 40TiB-45TiB of useable space from this (bearing in mind all the overheads - such as TB to TiB conversion, metadata, and a realistic maximum utilisation of 80% etc.).
And the speed of a failed pool is zero.
This is my advise too. And in Electric Eel RaidZ expansion is a thing.
As mentioned before, a failed pool is not very fast.
Redundancy is an availability technique.
OTOH, with a striped pool, if a drive starts looking dodgy, you can remove it. Any data on bad sectors will still be affected, of course, but it may be possible to remove a failing drive before it fails completely.
I’m not one to recommend striped pools, but that’s what best meets OP’s stated objectives.
