7x3Tb plus cache or just 8x3Tb ?

[BillCardiff]

Just looking for general input.
I would assume with the cache drive (SSD), but I wanted to be sure. Also how big of a cache drive ?

Current system is 6x3Tb - but I have a 3Tb coming from Seagate under warranty. My options are to buy another to make 8 drives across my IT flashed Dell h310 or go with 7x 3Tb and one SSD for a cache drive.

My content is all media. Movies and TV and music. I am serving to anywhere from one to up to 10 devices, with one box connecting direct to an SMB share, while most others would be through the Plex addon.

Any input would be appreciated. I am hoping to back up all data and create the new pool in about a ten days.
Drive space is not an issue, I have physical space for 15 drives with great air flow.
System is currently a single L5420 low wattage quad core xeon, with 26G of ram. It will soon be dual Xeons (same model) with 32G of the ECC ram.
Dual gigabit network.

 

[depasseg]

I would suggest going with an 8th data drive. In order to get a real benefit from a cache drive for your usage pattern, you would need a very large Cache which would require a lot more RAM.

 

[BillCardiff]

So just go for raw storage then and skip the cache drive ?

 

[depasseg]

So just go for raw storage then and skip the cache drive ?

Yep. That's what I would do.

 

[BillCardiff]

Good enough for me. Thank you. 24 raw TB of data it is !