TrueNAS core build with 70 x 15.36TB SAS Solid State Drive. What are my options

TrueNAS General
1

Hello,

I have a task and need help deciding the best approach to get this done. I currently have 3 x 24-bay 12Gb SAS JBODs populated with SAMSUNG MZ-ILS15T0 PM1633a 15.36TB SSD drives. These JBODs are connected to an LSI RAID card, with multiple RAID volumes shared over Samba running Linux with a 100Gb Nic on a 100Gb switch with 24 x 25Gb connections to editors.

I want to consolidate all 72 drives into a new SAS JBOD and have some questions:

Should I buy a single 70-bay JBOD and install all the drives in one unit?
Should I create a RAID-Z setup RAID 5 with multiple groups of 12 drives?
Alternatively, should I buy multiple 24-bay JBODs and manage them that way?

Eventually, I plan to add 24 more 15TB SSDs to expand storage.

Additional considerations:

How much RAM would you recommend for this setup? This will be a production server, with over 15 users editing data simultaneously over 25Gb connections.
The switch will have 24 ports of 25Gb for clients and a 100Gb NIC for the connection to the TrueNAS Core server.
Which SAS card would you recommend for this setup?
2

My recommendation would be to find professional help/support for this. It is a high-end commercial setup and as such pretty complex. Forum support in such situations bears the risk that some “small” details is not addressed, which then causes rather big issues.

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To your first set of questions, it doesn’t matter how the drives are physically installed, but the drives cannot be a 70-wide array: It has to be a stripe of multiple raidz(1/2), each preferably being 12-wide or less (preferably less).

For the fine details, please hire a storage consultant. Most forumers are out of their depth here—and those who are not would prefer to be paid for their professional skills.

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4

I’ve built the client 50 x 18tb drives zfs raid 6 for their backup and grew the volume once and all has been working great as their rsync storage.

5

You may want to consider Draid.

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6

This is the element that makes this config much more complex and not the scale in my view.

Are you planning on your users connecting via SMB? Can they even saturate their 25Gb connections (have you done any testing)? What’s the typical workload for these users? How is your TrueNAS connected to the network? Are you realistically going to saturate a 100Gb connection? What OS are the clients running?

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