L2ARC would keep main drives off ?

[lqbweb]

Hi,

I have a small server with 32gb ram and a raid 5 with 4 normal drives.
Right now, since I barely need access to the data inside I keep the whole server off most of the times, but now I am considering leaving it on with NextCloud running.

But I do not want the main drives to be running constantly (due to the noise, energy consumption, and hdd reliability). I was thinking I could perhaps put like a 1TB SSD as a L2ARC cache, and then keep the power saving mode turned on for the main drives so they only turn on when there is something to sync (which should happen very rarely).

Do you think this is a good idea? Or I would just be much better off, having a separated machine syncing the folders on a time basis ?

 

[jgreco]

I have a small server with 32gb ram and a raid 5 with 4 normal drives.

Hopefully you mean RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2

I was thinking I could perhaps put like a 1TB SSD as a L2ARC cache

To support 1TB of L2ARC on CORE, you need around 100-200GB of RAM (ARC). We don't even recommend L2ARC until you have a minimum 64GB of ARC. The ARC needs to be large enough to be able to hold sufficient data to determine good content to evict to the L2ARC, and if you fail to do this, it will just inefficiently grasp at straws to cache.

Put your NextCloud jail on the SSD instead. Be aware that spinning the drives up and down when there's activity is very hard on the drives. If there is no activity on the system, it should mostly be write activity that causes spinups, so be sure to disable stuff like atime updates that generate superfluous write activity.

 

[lqbweb]

yes, of course I meant RaidZ

ought! ok, thanks!

I will then have NextCloud as a different Proxmox VM, and rsync the folders during startup of TrueNas. This should be the best solution right?

 

[jgreco]

This should be the best solution right?

Can't say. Don't know your setup or your needs/wants. I can just tell you the stuff that I can predict being a problem. There are many potential ways to solve most problems, and "best solution" is rather subjective.

 

[lqbweb]

got it, thanks a lot :) will give this a shot