Recommendation for specific hardware config

[commandante]

Hello all,

I am new here and I am also new to FreeNAS.
I already have the bellow pieces of hardware.
Please advise me how to use them wisely.
Mainly, I need to know the right type/combination of RAIDZ for the disks I have in order to get the best balance between space/speed/redundancy/scalability.

The scope of the project is to build a NAS with following functions:

Private/family cloud for personal pictures and movies (2 - 4 TB) - Very important
Small business relative critical data, small database and office files (1 - 2 TB) - Very important
One Windows 10 VM, low resources needed (1 TB) - Not important
Other non critical misc. files (1 TB)

So, redundancy is kind of important, especially in the cloud zone...

The hardware:

CPU Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-9100 CPU @ 3.60GHz
MB Dual M.2, 8 x SATA, Dual Intel® Lan, Gigabyte - C246M-WU4-CF
2 x 16 GB DDR4-2400 (1200 MHz) ECC Unbuffered Samsung - M391A2K43BB1-CRC
750W 80 Plus Gold certified Gigabyte Power Supply- GP-G750H
NO PCI RAID CARD

1 x SSD 2.5", SATA III, 120 GB, KINGSTON V300 - SV300S37A120G
1 x SSD 2.5", SATA III, 240 GB, KINGSTON A400 - SA400S37/240G
1 x SSD M2, SATA III, 128 GB, SAMSUNG - MZNLF128HCHP
2 x HDD 3.5", SATA III, WD 12TB, HGST Ultrastar He12 - HUH721212ALE600
4 x HDD 3.5", SATA III, WD 4TB RED - WD40EFAX

Thank you in advance!

 

[Etorix]

You should have asked before buying…
The PSU is oversized, but that won't hurt.
The mix of drives is puzzling. One 120/128 GB SDD as boot drive; there would be little point in mirroring it. One 240 GB SSD, too small for a 1 TB VM.
HDDs would best be of similar size for one RAIDZ2 vdev: That's the minimal geometry for "important" data which should not be lost.

• All HDDs in one Z2 vdev wastes the 12 TB drives, but is already large enough for all data. "Scalability" would be replacing all 4 TB drives by larger ones. No good solution for the VM here.
• 4*4 TB in RAIDZ2 is not very efficient, but 8 TB raw (ca. 6 TB usable) is large enough for all your "very important" data. Scalabilty is a second 4-wide RAIDZ2. But you may run out of SATA ports. A mirror with the 12 TB not quite safe storage, and is way too large for the "non critical", but I suppose it could host the "non critical misc." and the VM—if running Windows out of spinning rust is bearable.

 

[HoneyBadger]

WD40EFAX

SMR drives. Return and purchase WD Red Plus (WD40EFRX) instead.

What is the intended purpose behind the 3x SSD mix? Potential for L2ARC use, but none of them are suitable as an SLOG device. If the Win10 VM is considered "low importance" or "not important" you may be able to run without sync writes and let the chips fall where they may.

 

[commandante]

The mix is puzzling, indeed.
I didn't bought anything especially for this project.
All the disks and the SSD mix comes from other, different projects/server.
It is not my intention to use them all in this NAS.
I just list them all to chose the best ones.

Win10 VM is not important at all, it is just nice to have.
Unfortunately, I can not return the WD40EFAX, I have to stick with them until the end of the pandemic...I think :)
Thank you very much for your input, anyway!

 

[HoneyBadger]

SMR drives are considered a Bad Thing for the health and performance of your pool; I really would suggest investigating if you have any avenues to return them.

For your SSD choices, you could certainly use one of them for a boot device (the M.2 would be fine, assuming that the use of the M.2 slot in SATA mode does not consume one of the 8 available ports) - the others could be used as a metadata-only L2ARC for your primary pool which would speed up directory browsing. You could use them for a full data L2ARC as well if you anticipate reading the same group of files frequently, and this dataset will be beyond the ~32GB capacity of your ARC.