16*6TB SAS drives. What's the best configuration?

[IonutZ]

Hey there,

I'm adding a new pool via an H740P HBA of 16 SAS drives with 6TB capacity each. I'm storing pictures, movies, backups, mostly smaller files rather than larger files. I have 24 cores running at 3Ghz and 96GB of RAM dedicated to this VM that's running on top of ESXi. I want to know how you would configure this pool of drives if you were me. Do I need cache/metadata/dedup/log? All my data currently resides on a smaller RAID-Z2 pool (2 vdevs * 6 drives each).

Thank you for your insights!

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

How do you plan to connect your drives to your VM? Do you use pass through of the entire HBA?

 

[IonutZ]

How do you plan to connect your drives to your VM? Do you use pass through of the entire HBA?

That's correct. I currently have an MD1200 through an LSI9200 in IT mode also passed through.