Help with 10GBe media server setup. Do I still need ZFS?

[geo2160]

Hello everybody,

 

I've had my server running Proxmox and ZFS for a year now. Setup and maintenance of LXC containers was a fun learning experience at first, but I don't have the time or patience anymore to fix Plex in a terminal every time Nvidia releases a driver update. So I downloaded an Unraid trial and had some fun testing it. However, my setup was carefully planned with ZFS in mind and I wanted to ask for a second opinion before migrating my data.

 

The server hardware, as configured currently, looks like this:

Quote

Storage:

- 8X 4TB HGST drives

- 2x 1TB Sabrent Rocket 4 NVME drives

- 1x 512GB A-data NVME drive

- 1x 256GB SATA SSD

Hardware:

- Ryzen 2700x

- 64GB ECC RAM (I think ECC is working too)

- Nvidia Quadro P600

- Intel X520 10GBE NIC

 

The main use case for this server is media storage and Plex. I expect to get 10GBe internet this year, so I want to set it up properly, so that I will get the best download/upload speeds. I want to try some other plugins/services down the line, but I don't expect that to pose an 

 

I watched some of spaceinvaderone's tutorials, the ZFS plugin thread and I've arrived to the following options:

 

1) Go with pure Unraid/btrfs: 6x4tb unraid drive pool, 2x 4tb parity, 1x 512gb nvme cache for writes, 2x1tb nvme cache for plugins. This would give me a lot more storage and probably good speeds for what I need, but it will burn my SSDs faster. It also makes maintenance pretty painless from what I can see.

 

2) Go with zfs hybrid: 1x nvme unraid drive pool for plugins, 1x nvme drive parity, 8x4tb RAIDz mirror for storage. The RAIDz is fast enough for my media storage needs (~600MB/s seq writes in my testing) and I have more than enough RAM for a decently sized ARC. However, maintenance looks like a hassle, since Unraid does not have native ZFS support atm.

 

What do you guys think? Should I still bother with ZFS?