Tips for booting to USB (and NAS configuration)

[WhiteTiger]

I want to assemble a NAS for about 5 users and in perspective to use NextCloud.
I was going to use SCALE because it is based on the Debian I know best.
I only have an Asrock-Fm2A85X-Itx motherboard available
with AMD Quad core CPU and 16GB RAM.
The motherboard has 7 SATA3 connectors.
The case can accommodate 4x3.5" HDDs, 2 x 2.5" disks and I was thinking of inflating another 2.5" disk in the DVD bay.

My idea was to create a RAID-Z2 volume with 4x1TB HDDs and a RAID-Z1 volume with 3x1TB SSDs.
Or use 7x1TB SSDs and use RAID-Z3.

For the boot I wanted to use a good 32/64GB USB 3.0 stick, or two to create the mirroring.

What do you recommend?
And what is your opinion about my configuration?

 

[elvisimprsntr]

USB flash drives are specifically not recommended, as they do not have the same wear leveling or write life cycles due to their use of cheap flash memory. If you have no other option, while not ideal, a SSD in a USB enclosure is a better option than cheap flash drives.

 

[Chris3773]

Anything is really better then a flash drive. However if for what reason you need to use flash drives, buy a whole pack at once of the same flash drive. The reason is even the same model of flash drive you buy at a later date may have a smaller format size, making a rebuild fail because the drive is too small even though it says 32GB on the pack. In that case you would need to buy a bigger drive for a rebuild. I would also stay with USB 2.0 flash drives as I have seen some bad controllers for USB 3.0 which have drop outs, requiring a rebuild of your pool. You will want two or more in a mirrored pool.

 

[WhiteTiger]

With 4x1TB HDD and 5 users, can 8GB RAM be enough instead of 16GB?