I have an old HP N40L MicroServer running FreeNAS 11.3 which I'm planning on upgrading to TrueNAS 12 soon. It has a 4 drive RAIDZ array setup for storing mostly videos, photos and system backups on the server's storage pool. It is connected to my computer via GigE.
I'd like to add a spare 1 TB SATA SSD that I have at my disposal as a means to somehow boost the performance. I'd thought about a cache for the RAIDZ pool, but it seems like there is a lot of material online suggesting I'll be disappointed at the performance gains of doing so. I'm intrigued by the new addition of support to offload metadata and small files to an SSD in TrueNAS 12, but I'm hesitant to go that route since the N40L has only one remaining SATA connector, which means there would be no redundancy for said SSD.
Given these caveats, is there a way to take the equipment I have available to optimize ZFS performance or should I just use the SSD as a separate drive?
I'd like to add a spare 1 TB SATA SSD that I have at my disposal as a means to somehow boost the performance. I'd thought about a cache for the RAIDZ pool, but it seems like there is a lot of material online suggesting I'll be disappointed at the performance gains of doing so. I'm intrigued by the new addition of support to offload metadata and small files to an SSD in TrueNAS 12, but I'm hesitant to go that route since the N40L has only one remaining SATA connector, which means there would be no redundancy for said SSD.
Given these caveats, is there a way to take the equipment I have available to optimize ZFS performance or should I just use the SSD as a separate drive?