Can TrueNAS Mini X+ replace an OWC Thunderbay4 in RAID5 and Synology DS918+? Should it??

[eoren1]

Current setup:
OWC Thunderbay 4 (the older TB2 one) in RAID5 via their SoftRAID serves as main storage of about 6.5TB of photos (I do landscape photography as a side gig so those photos are worth money to me) and about 5TB of other stuff. Connected directly to my 14" M1 Macbook Pro with read/write speeds of about 450 from the 4 HGST spinning drives.

That Thunderbay is backed up to a Synology DS918+ that lives in the basement and also acts as the Plex Server plus several 'arr applications via Docker and TailScale. The Synology 'just works' which is nice.

The OWC Thunderbay is 7 years old with 5 year old drives and now needs a second $120 SoftRAID upgrade fee in as many years to be usable with OS Ventura.

After lots of research, I think the Mini X+ running TrueNAS might be a perfect fit as I currently have no protection from bitrot which I would gain with OpenZFS.

I'm computer literate enough to follow directions but no linux level knowledge.
So...

1. What speeds can I expect to get from TrueNAS on the Mini X+ with RAIDZ1? Would this be physically accomplished with cat6 cable running from the Mini X+ to a dongle then TB3 to the Mac?
2. How would I set up the SSDs to improve the read/write speed?
3. How would Plex compare on the Mini X+ to the Synology DS918+? I have Plex Pass so I get hardware transcoding now
4. Is it easier to go with TrueNAS Core and install the plugins for Plex and all the 'arr applications rather than going with Scale and copying over the Docker folders?
5. Does my plan actually make sense? Alternative is to pay the $120 fee and keep things status quo but those 5 year old spinning drives make me nervous about bitrot more than impending failure of more than 1. I do have them backed up incrementally to the Synology then to an external from there as well as constantly to Backblaze so I'm not banking on RAID5 as 'backup'
6. Another alternative is to just buy two 4TB SSDs and two 12 TB HDDs and replace what is in the Thunderbay and use Mac OS to create an SSD volume for the photos and another for the HDDs since access to that data is limited.
7. I'll admit, part of this consideration is another 'project' to keep my middle aged brain active but don't want to go to far down a rabbit hole of frustration either. How much YouTube watching will I need to do to make this work for me?

Thanks!

 

[Arwen]

Here are some answers, (don't have time tonight to dig into other questions).

1. RAID-Z1 is NOT recommended for disks larger than 1TB. Don't know about speed.

2. L2ARC SSDs for read cache are not recommended until you max out your TrueNAS memory. That is because the L2ARC directory exists in RAM. As for write speeds, SLOGs are not a write cache. If you need good write speed, a separate ZFS pool of SSDs, (even SATA SSDs), can be used to write data. Then you can have a background task migrate the files to the main, (and slower hard disk), pool.

7. Many ZFS or TrueNAS Youtube videos do not show best practices, like re-using an old gaming rig for a NAS. (Or listening to Linus Tech Tips, shudder.) We TrueNAS uses want our NAS' to be reliable, which require specific hardware and specific configuration of that hardware. Which a Mini X+ will meet the first, and asking questions here can help with the second.

 

[eoren1]

Thanks Arwen

After much consideration, I think I'll stick with a more basic external approach rather than going down the rabbit hole of learning a new OS.