October 22, 20241 yr Hi everyone, I bought a license this spring before the sub. model was released and I am about to put it to use. I dont need loads of hd-space and I dont need insane speeds either. I plan to use 2.5gbit network. More important for me that its silent and dont use alot of energy to run. Its a ASRock N100 system with 32GB of memory. To start with I have 2x 1TB Samsung Sata SSD`s and 1x 500GB NVMe drive. It will be used for Home Assistant VM or run it in docker, other docker containers, some general storage and to learn more about Unraid. My question is.. Opt. 1 Should I use 1 SSD as parity, 1 SSD as pool drive and the 500GB as cache drive This would make it very flexible the way I understand things with Unraid so far and lets me add drives to the pool as I please with different sizes below 1TB ofc. I can also format the pool drive as ZFS and get access to snapshots or add another drive later for that. But is there any point of having a cache drive with this setup... the two things I can think of is less wear on the pool and parity drive + future proofing in case I add spinning drives later or is it other benefits of adding cache drive? Opt. 2 Should I use 1 SSD as parity and the other two as pool drives and skip the cache since they are all SSD`s? I am aware that I could run the 2 SSD`s in ZFS, but I dont feel like I need that and I lose alot of flexibility. Maybe there is another obvious setup I dont know about or didnt think of.. Any feedback on this would be great. Thank you. Unraid version would be latest release version.
October 23, 20241 yr Author Solution Thank you both! Its my own mistake for not reading up enough on this. Short plain answer for others who might have the same idea I had.. when using the array you have paritiy drive(s). SSD`s does not work well with that and should be avoided. New plan is to use the 2x Samsung SATA SSD`s as pool devices either mirrored or by themselves. Not decided yet. Use the 500 GB NVMe drive also as a pool device but working as a cache for 2x 2.5 inch 5400 RPM 1 TB wd spinning drives. Those should be low power usage and silent. I assume they will sleep most of the time apart from when the mover is working and if I access data on them. Got plenty of new drives like that from new customer laptop`s I have sold that got replaced with SSD`s a couple years back. This setup should give me the "full" Unraid experience to test out things in a reliable way and I expand on it as I see fit. Not sure if I should use ZFS or BTRFS on the pool devices though, I read in forums that some went back to BTRFS from ZFS after some issues. I also read some use ZFS on one drive in array to get access to snapshots. Any big mistakes in this setup or does this seem ok?
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