Long time storage administrator, soon-to-be-first-time TrueNAS user. I’m building a homelab on a Qotom Q20331G9 1U. Already running Proxmox, plan to run TrueNAS as VM with hardware passthrough of SATA controller. System has two on-board SATA ports plus four more SATA via a SFF-8087 port. I’ll be adding a 4-drive enclosure with spinning disks configured into two mirror vdevs in a single pool.
Initially I thought I’d be using the on-board SATA for a pair of SSDs performing some sort of caching but first I did my homework and read up on SLOG/L2ARC/SVDEV and a number of forum posts explaining when (or not) to use these. I’ll be allocating at least 16GB (and possibly as much as 32GB) of RAM to the VM so I don’t see any of these providing much benefit for my simple configuration. The only one that might benefit me is a metadata-only L2ARC but frankly I won’t (at least initially) have all that much on this storage pool. My “production” storage remains my Synology unit at least until I become much more comfortable with TrueNAS… which is my reason for building this.
Internally I can only use 2.5" drives so spinners don’t make much sense, I’d rather throw a couple SSDs in there (and I have a few lying around anyway). Would the best use of those onboard SATA just be building a second pool with a single mirror vdev of SSD drives? Does anybody have another recommendation?
Again, this is mostly a sandbox for me right now, just to play around and learn the platform. And because it is itself running as a VM under Proxmox I don’t think I’ll really be deploying much in the way of containerized apps on TrueNAS. Because I understand that would be a potential use for a dedicated SSD storage pool. But I do want to tinker with presenting iSCSI LUNs from TrueNAS to Proxmox for potentially storing other VMs, so that’s where an SSD pool could be useful.
Virtual disks for the TrueNAS VM will be located on NVMe storage connected directly to Proxmox host (which also contain Proxmox OS). I’ve considered not presenting the two on-board SATA to TrueNAS and instead install Proxmox OS onto those and dedicate the NVMe to just VM storage but I suspect the two on-board SATA and the four SFF-8087 SATA are connected to the same controller and since I want to passthrough the controller to TrueNAS I don’t think I’ll be able to use those on-board SATA for Proxmox.