Moving from Unraid to TrueNAS - pool advice needed

[lcasale]

I'm upgrading my self built NAS to a Dell R730xd and making the move from Unraid to TrueNAS (virtualized in Proxmox). Currently I have 40TB of useable storage (5x 10TB) and looking to get a little more. Also I plan to centralize my Proxmox cluster VM storage. Ultimately, my main objectives are to improve stability and increase storage with increasing performance as a secondary goal. I've been researching the last few weeks searching through the forum and reading articles like this and this. I still have a lot to learn but here's what I'm thinking...

Pool 1 - used for Proxmox VMs

• Option 1
  • mirror vdev1 - 2x Samsung PM983 960GB NVME
  • mirror vdev2 - 2x Samsung PM983 960GB NVME
• Option 2
  • mirror vdev1 - 2x Toshiba 1.92TB SSD SAS12G

Pool 2 - used for storage (GoPro footage, nextcloud storage, VM backups, etc)

• 6-Wide Z2 - 6x 18TB+ spinning rust which nets to 65TB+ of usable storage depending on size

Some other details on the environment...

• Servers using this as storage (both Pool 1 and Pool 2) are connected 10Gbe
• Most other clients will be using Pool 2 will are mainly 1Gbe with plans to upgrade to either 2.5Gbe or 10Gbe in the future

I'm ready to pull the trigger on the Pool 1 hardware and will probably search for deals to eventually build Pool 2. So my questions are...

1. Which is preferred option for Pool 1? I'm open to adding a second identical vdev for option 2 eventually.
2. Does pool 2 look good? Or should I aim to have more, smaller disks with more vdevs to achieve similar capacity?
3. Should I look at getting a SLOG for Pool 2? If so, how big should it be?

Thanks!

 

[sretalla]

Should I look at getting a SLOG for Pool 2? If so, how big should it be?

If you're thinking about SLOG, you are usually looking for more write IOPS... not a job that RAIDZ2 is good for (has the IOPS of only a single disk).

Forget the SLOG idea until you work out if RAIDZ2 is right for what you want to use that pool for. (it's easy to add SLOG to a pool later, but not so easy to change from RAIDZ2 to mirrors if write IOPS is what you really want).

Does pool 2 look good? Or should I aim to have more, smaller disks with more vdevs to achieve similar capacity?

Depends on the throughput you want... probably OK.

Which is preferred option for Pool 1? I'm open to adding a second identical vdev for option 2 eventually.

More VDEVs is better for block storage. SSDs have high IOPS anyway, so maybe not making huge amounts of difference between 1 and 2 mirrors, but it's easy enough to add more (and rebalance the pool) if you do need that.