I’m putting together a NAS with a Supermicro sc721tq-350b2 chassis, a Supermicro x12stl-if mini-ITX motherboard, an NVMe drive for the OS and some scratch space, and 4 WD Red drives that will be set up as mirrored vdevs in a single pool for the actual data storage.

Now, the motherboard has 6x SATA ports, and the chassis has 4x 3.5" hotswap drive bays, and 2x locations in the chassis to mount a 2.5" drive. I also have a few consumer-grade SSDs laying around.

I plan to run Nextcloud on this server, as well as a few other things (Grafana or equivalent, Home Assistant, Unifi controller, maybe some photo sharing service, etc).

How can I put these this to best use? Here are some ideas that have popped into my head:

  • Make a mirror vdev out of SSDs, create a separate pool, and use that to host the various databases of the above services (but are consumer-grade SSDs a good idea for that?)
  • Use one or both of these drives for an L2ARC (but with 64 GB of RAM, will I really get good returns from that?)
  • Use both of these drives as ZIL (but again, are consumer-grade SSDs a good idea for that?)
  • Get 2.5" regular hard drives to make the pool even bigger (but I’m far from needing that much capacity, so I think that’s overkill)
  • Something else I didn’t think of?
  • FlorentROPBEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Good to know!

    Also, thinking about it, I don’t know if a ZIL would make that much of a difference for the main pool - its main purpose will be storage for a personal cloud (a few family members have their documents syncing to it, and it currently has around a TB of data), so data writes should be somewhat bursty as people are not using their computers 24/7.