Hard drives assignment - advice needed

[BeersTeddy]

Currently, I'm testing UNRAID and I'm wondering what would be the best hard drives assignment for my simple needs:

 

- Typical home NAS home files

- Plex server for fairly small collection ~4TB of Films and Tv series (99% direct play, no video transcoding)

- QBittorrent or Deluge seeding 24/7

- Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr etc

- some other docker containers

- in the future maybe some sort of CCTV.

 

- The main goal is energy efficiency since this one is going to cost me a fortune from April.

 

Equipment:

HP Proliant ML10 gen9, Xeon E3-1225v5 (the one with iGPU), 32GB RAM

2x 18TB

1x 500GB NVME

1x 240GB SSD

1x 4TB 2.5"

1x 3TB 3.5" (pretty old, no errors)

1x 2TB 3.5" SSHD (pretty old, 3 bad sectors I think)

1x 1TB 2.5" kind of pointless in here

 

- 2x 18TB for parity and main drive in the array - I'm sure about them... and only them. I'm trying to prevent them from spinning up as I don't need instant access to NAS

 

- 3TB possibly formatted to NTFS, unassigned, used as an additional backup? (this should keep it in standby mode?) Don't need this extra storage. 

- 2TB will go to USB caddy as an additional offsite backup for the most of most important files (3,2,1 ish)???

 

- 4TB 2.5" - since is the most energy-efficient one, will be used for torrenting. The question is: Cache_Torrenting, or just as unassigned? Probably this drive will be 75%-90% full most of the time, spinning 24/7.

 

500GB NVME - Cache for Docker/Plex/Qbittorent seems to be the way to go???

240GB SSD - not sure what to do with it. Ideally should use it as the second cache for the torrent drive but this doesn't seem to be possible, since I can have only one array.

 

Is my plan any good?

I'm fully open to suggestions

Edited March 17, 2022 by BeersTeddy
update

[itimpi]

6 hours ago, BeersTeddy said:

Ideally should use it as the second cache for the torrent drive but this doesn't seem to be possible, since I can have only one array.

Not quite sure what you mean here?    You can only have 1 main array but you can have multiple pools that can act as cache or application drives.   Pools can be single drive or multi-drive (using BTRFS RAID modes).

[BeersTeddy]

4 hours ago, itimpi said:

Not quite sure what you mean here?    You can only have 1 main array but you can have multiple pools that can act as cache or application drives.   Pools can be single drive or multi-drive (using BTRFS RAID modes).

Must admit. A bit confusing. The glory of not being native speaker...

 

Ideally I would like to have two separate arrays.

Array_1 = 18TB + 18TB + 500GB_NVME_cache. for main data, 99% of the in IDLE. Nothing to do with torrent

 

Array_2 = XXTB_2.5" + 4TB_Torrent_2.5" + 240GB_SSD_Cache for seeding spinning 24/7. Not so important data so could use some old hard drives for it, yet, still need some hdd failure protection. All torrenting related containers will be in here.

 

From what I've found this is not possible to achieve in unraid, so question is what other options do I have

 

 

[itimpi]

What you can have which I think achieves what you want is:

2x18TB in main array

500GB NVME as pool1 set to act as cache for shares on main array

 

pool2 with multiple spinning HD set up as RAID1 to give redundancy to be used for torrenting. 

 

still leaves other drives free to either be added to array, or perhaps used as pools for hosting VMs and/or Docker containers.

 

the Unraid roadmap does talk about having multiple main arrays, but if this ever does materialise it is still some way off.

 

 

 

 

[BeersTeddy]

Just now, itimpi said:

What you can have which I think achieves what you want is:

2x18TB in main array

500GB NVME as pool1 set to act as cache for shares on main array

 

pool2 with multiple spinning HD set up as RAID1 to give redundancy to be used for torrenting. 

 

still leaves other drives free to either be added to array, or perhaps used as pools for hosting VMs and/or Docker containers.

 

 

 

Interesting. Never thought about it. 

 

What about the rest of cache drives? Any better ideas? 

[itimpi]

I would use the additional SSD’s for hosting data for docker containers or VMs.   They could also be added to pool1 to give more capacity (or redundancy) there.

[BeersTeddy]

1 hour ago, itimpi said:

I would use the additional SSD’s for hosting data for docker containers or VMs.   They could also be added to pool1 to give more capacity (or redundancy) there.

So nvme + ssd in one pool as combined cache. 

Is this case ssd gonna slow down nvme? 

[itimpi]

8 minutes ago, BeersTeddy said:

Is this case ssd gonna slow down nvme?

yes, which is why I would probably use the different types in different pools optimised for their particular use case (or simply not use them all).