neimad

Thanks, that sounds like a good idea. Someone on reddit also suggested: Unraid Array: 1x16TB Parity, all other HDD as array disks; 34TB usable, fully protected Cache Pools: POOL #1 - btrfs raid1 of the 1x8TB + 1x4TB + 2x2TB. 8TB of usable space, fully protected. Use for appdata, system, domains, Docker/VM related shares. POOL #2 - single 1TB nvme SSD and use as an array cache for downloads / data, etc. Do you see any issues with this?

The Unraid Docs and the r/Unraid subreddit have been a treasure trove of information, but I'm still no closer to knowing what's the optimum configuration for my mix of HDDs and SSDs. I'm hoping this community can help me with some expert suggestions. My main goal for setting up my home server is to act as a media server and store family documents/photos/videos. I chose Unraid because I already had a mix of HDDs and SSDs, of varying sizes. These are the drives I can put into my server: 2x 16TB HDD 1x 10TB HDD 1x 8TB HDD 1x 8TB SATA SSD 1x 4TB SATA SSD 2x 2TB SATA SSD 1x 1TB NVMe SSD (think I will put this in my workstation instead of my server, unless there is a good reason otherwise) I initially thought it would be as simple as chucking everything into a single array, with one of the 16TB HDDs as a parity drive. Then I read about cache pools and how they can improve write speeds. Then I also read that putting SSDs into an array would be suboptimal at best, and unsupported at worst. My main priority is to maximise capacity - I currently have about 35-40TB of data which I intend to store on my Unraid server. I'm okay with the minimum amount of redundancy - that's why I was okay having just the single 16TB parity drive. Having a cache would be cool too, if possible for my configuration. Any and all suggestions for an optimum configuration for my setup are welcome.