Hi all, new to Unraid and trying to understand how to set up correctly.

I recently bought a Beelink ME Mini which has 6x NVMe SSD slots. I'm aiming to use this as a home NAS/media server with Jellyfin.

My understanding is that an all NVMe SSD array is only recently supported in Unraid, experimental, and not recommended to be used for parity due to lack of TRIM support. I'm having some trouble finding up-to-date info on how to go about setting up for it.

My questions are:

• I keep seeing ZFS/RAIDZ suggested as the best solution. I have a slow (2.5gbs) switch, network is my biggest bottleneck. At this stage I'm not worried about r/w speed, I just want reliable network shares and low power consumption. Is XFS/BTRFS viable?

• Cache drive? The typical model is to use SSD for cache and HDD for array, but that's redundant in my case right? Should I only create an array pool?

• What does that mean for docker/appdata, where does it live if there is no cache drive? Do I need to add a cache drive just to give that data a home?

• Am I right about parity drives being not recommended in this set up? I am thinking to focus on offsite back up instead of parity, is that a sound conclusion?

• Or is it better to just use the NVMe for cache pool and buy a USB HDD deck?

I'm getting the impression Unraid might not be the best suited to my set up, but I tried Proxmox and couldn't get samba shares working reliably and gave up. Unraid worked in about 10 minutes and I like using it. Thanks in advance for any/all help!!

If speed is not a concern, you could still use the devices with an array, but with 6 NVMe devices, I would recommend creating a raidz1 pool.

3 hours ago, ac86 said:

What does that mean for docker/appdata, where does it live if there is no cache drive?

You configure where it is to live. In your case it can be on any pool/array

The same applies to 'caching' which is configured at the User Share level, but if you have an all SSD pool /array being used for the data then caching is probably irrelevant It only make sense when you have a traditional Unraid parity protected array using HDD to improve perceived performance for new files.