Hello,
Prospective user here looking to set up my first NAS and interested in possibly using Unraid as the OS. I recently backed the 6 Bay DXP6800 Ugreen NASync on on Kickstarter. I have concerns about the new/untested software these units will be shipping with and found Unraid from doing research on good replacement OS. I have already purchased 6 14TB WD Red Pro HDDs and 2 1TB NVME SSDs which maxes out the available respective slots for this device. I was looking to get advice on how best to configure the various hard drives to best meet my use cases. I am hoping to use my NAS for plex, photo/file storage and access remotely, running surveillance cameras, recipe management, and possibly many other things once I dive in. A couple specific questions are had are:
1. Surveillance Storage: I plan to use my NAS for storing surveillance footage. To avoid the constant writes from the cameras negatively impacting the overall storage array, I am considering using one of the 14TB drives as 'unassigned' device for the surveillance data. I don't need parity or redundancy for this footage. Is having the surveillance drive as a separate 'unassigned' device a good approach for this use case?
2. Cache Pool: I only have the 2 1TB NVMe SSDs and no additional slots for future expansion. Would it be best to use these SSDs as a mirrored cache pool for the main 5-drive 14TB array? I plan to run Plex and a photo backup solution like Immich or Nextcloud via Docker. How should I best utilize these 2 SSDs? Should I format them as ZFS or BTRFS?
3. Main Array Configuration: For the other 5 14TB HDDs, I plan to set them up as the main array with 1 drive dedicated to parity/redundancy. Should I configure this array as ZFS or XFS? My setup is maxed out, so I don't plan to add more HDDs in the future. Does this affect your recommendations?