I'm looking to salvage parts from a failed QNAP that has some really nice hardware inside, and thinking I could salvage some of it to create a killer FreeNAS using a Mini XL+ as a base. It's time to switch to ZFS. If everything goes to plan, the hardware would look like this:
FreeNAS Mini XL+
- 8-core C3758 Atom CPU
- 256 GB ECC RDIMM DDR4 RAM
- 8x 12TB HDD in RAIDz2
- 3x 4TB Samsung SSDs (2 internal, 1 hot-swap)
- 1x 280 GB Intel Optane 900P
- 1x 4TB PCI-E Nvme M.2
The main use case is raw photo storage, about 40 TB of photos, average size ~20MB per file. 8x 12TB in RAIDz2, if I'm calculating this correctly, should give me just under 72 TB of usable space.
I'd like to run de-duplication as many times we are storing the same photos in different user's home directories as they work off the photo. I'd calculate that around 15% of the space in use is "redundant."
My first question is: do I have enough RAM to run de-duplication?
For the remaining hardware, I was thinking:
- 4TB PCI-E Nvme M.2 -- L2ARC
- 280GB Optane 900P -- ZIL/SLOG
- 2x 4TB SSDs -- Mirrored encrypted drives for documents
- 1x 4TB SSD -- Secondary cache for metadata to speed up rsync which we regularly use for offsite backups
Does this look right? Or, is there a better way I could utilize this hardware? Another idea I had was to partition the 280 GB Optane and use half for ZIL/SLOG and the other half for a metadata cache.
I'd also love to use the integrated QAT acceleration on the Atom C3858 but I'm not sure if FreeNAS/TrueNAS supports gzip-qat yet?
Very excited to get this going ... just want to make sure I'm doing things right! Thanks in advance.
FreeNAS Mini XL+
- 8-core C3758 Atom CPU
- 256 GB ECC RDIMM DDR4 RAM
- 8x 12TB HDD in RAIDz2
- 3x 4TB Samsung SSDs (2 internal, 1 hot-swap)
- 1x 280 GB Intel Optane 900P
- 1x 4TB PCI-E Nvme M.2
The main use case is raw photo storage, about 40 TB of photos, average size ~20MB per file. 8x 12TB in RAIDz2, if I'm calculating this correctly, should give me just under 72 TB of usable space.
I'd like to run de-duplication as many times we are storing the same photos in different user's home directories as they work off the photo. I'd calculate that around 15% of the space in use is "redundant."
My first question is: do I have enough RAM to run de-duplication?
For the remaining hardware, I was thinking:
- 4TB PCI-E Nvme M.2 -- L2ARC
- 280GB Optane 900P -- ZIL/SLOG
- 2x 4TB SSDs -- Mirrored encrypted drives for documents
- 1x 4TB SSD -- Secondary cache for metadata to speed up rsync which we regularly use for offsite backups
Does this look right? Or, is there a better way I could utilize this hardware? Another idea I had was to partition the 280 GB Optane and use half for ZIL/SLOG and the other half for a metadata cache.
I'd also love to use the integrated QAT acceleration on the Atom C3858 but I'm not sure if FreeNAS/TrueNAS supports gzip-qat yet?
Very excited to get this going ... just want to make sure I'm doing things right! Thanks in advance.
