ZFS raidz or raid10 or both?

[JinxCappa]

This might be a long post. I am currently building a new storage server.

I currently have 4 - 2TB drives of uncertain origin in a raid10. I believe 2 are greens and maybe a black and a Seagate. I recently purchased 4 Seagate 3TB NAS drives so I will have 8 HDD's in total. My question is this:

I run Plex in a VM and created a universal pool at the moment running on a separate box using OmniOS. I do like the idea of using a raid10 setup for my zones and KVM. I am almost at full capacity with most of my data being media. So for my new build should I:

A: Just do a big raid 10 stripping across 4 mirrors?

B: Create a single pool with 2 vdevs of raidz1 stripped?

C: Create 2 pools. One raid10 for VMs. One raidz1 for just media files. (I'm completely fine with single disk failure as media is not that important)

Currently I have an old ssd as a slog and bought a new Intel s3500 for the new box. If running separate pools I can have separate slogs.

I'm leaning to C only because of space increase with raidz1. My only concern is that that pool will be shared with plex,sabnzbd, and transmission so the iops with downloading and possibly transcoding up to 4-5 simultaneous clients has me a bit concerned. If I share the pool via NFS I know the ssd will help but that's why I'm on here now looking for suggestions. Thanks in advance.

 

[JJT211]

I think Plan C is your best bet as you wont be wasting any storage space due to the size differences in the disk and you'll also get increased IO performance w/ the RAID Z1.

Since it appears your system is new, why dont you just test the media config. Create the Z1, throw 4 or 5 of your highest quality media files in the pool and test performance. Shouldnt take that long at all since your 3TB disks are new. That being said, I doubt the bottleneck will be your system, it will most likely be your upstream bandwidth.

When you say transcode, im assuming these are host outside your network. Only way I see getting around the bandwidth problem is lowering the quality of the streams. Whats your upstream bandwidth?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Please don't use z1. This level of redundancy is very minimal and could easily result in full pool data loss.

 

[JJT211]

He's going for performance, he obviously knows what he's doing.

C: Create 2 pools. One raid10 for VMs. One raidz1 for just media files. (I'm completely fine with single disk failure as media is not that important)

Why the RAID police always gotta show up regardless of what someone says?