New Build: Drive Setup Questions

[jellyroot]

Hi everyone and thanks for taking the time to read and offer feedback if you do!

I come from a background of 10 years in a Synology build that has lasted longer than I'd have expected. My use cases are primarily NAS/Home Server, but more recently I've been playing with more virtualization and llama models etc. I've made a decision to retire my old Synology and build an Unraid Server with:

x30 14tb sata drives

x2 480gb M.2 SSDs

x1 4tb M.2 SSD

x1 1tb Intel Optane SSD

128gb ram

Ada 4000 GPU 

EPYC 8124P 

 

Given the size of the server and number of drives, I want to make sure I get it right day one structurally and make sure I setup the server for success.

 

My current thinking is to go for a build as follows (all using drives on a ZFS file system):

x30 14tb drive array with 3 parity drives

x2 480gb ssds in a raid 1 cache pool hosting /appdata and metadata

x1 Intel Optane as a 1tb SLOG

4tb ssd as a L2ARC cache on a single drive.

 

Does this make sense? Or would you suggest another way of handling it? I was originally thinking of going with 3 z2 pools of 10 drives each, which I felt would give me more efficiency, safety and practicality (I could theoretically just zpool import them into another device if needed so I'm not stuck with unraids proprietary file infrastructure. But I've warmed up more to the idea of unraid array instead of zpools. 

 

Happy to hear any thoughts and guidance on how to do this better.

 

 

 

Edited September 7, 2024 by jellyroot

[Veah]

30 minutes ago, jellyroot said:

But I've warmed up more to the idea of unraid array instead of zpools. 

The unraid array is super simple and great for hoarding data.  Typical array format is xfs if that helps.  With a system as nice (and large) as yours, there is certainly room for both zpools and a sizeable array.  You should play with it some before migrating.