Assistance with new build

[mfwade]

Greeting Everyone,

 

UnRaid noob here (not new to the storage industry though...) I am in the process of building a new NAS for my ever growing media collection. As such, I have a few questions... The build will consist of a Supermicro 24 bay 2.5" server. I will be using qty. (24) 3.8TB SSD's. So, my question is this. Should I use the same type SSD for the cache drive/s or forgo the SSD and use either a 1TB 10K SATA or 1.2TB 15K SAS or better yet, a 960GB Samsung MLC SSD? Do I even need cache as this will be a 'simple' NAS? This build will not be running any Docker or VM's (at least for now) as I have a multiple node ESX cluster.

 

Thanks you all in advance for your support.

 

 

[trurl]

SSDs are not recommended in the parity array and cannot be trimmed. Typically you would use spinners in the array and SSDs in the cache pool. What are you trying to accomplish by using SSDs in the array?

[mfwade]

Nothing more than I have tons of them and would like to use them.  The only spinners I have are 1.2TB 15K however at 22 drives, that’s only 28ish TB’s.... In contrast, 22 SSD drives comes in at 83ish TB’s.

 

i tested a few drives in a 16 drive array with 2 parity. Seemed ok however it was only running for a few days.

 

i thought I saw someone else running SSD’s in the forum albeit without incident. 

 

Are there plans for UnRAID to eventually support SSD’s?

[JorgeB]

You can use SSDs, they can't be trimmed for now but depending on the SSDs used they might still maintain a decent performance, and while it shouldn't be a problem you should also run frequent parity checks in the beginning just to confirm there are no parity sync issues.

 

1 hour ago, mfwade said:

Are there plans for UnRAID to eventually support SSD’s?

There are plans by LT to support trim, but it won't work with all SSDs and can't tell you when it's going to be available.

[mfwade]

Thank you all for your responses. Can anyone answer the cache query? Really just curious if  need to utilize the cache feature in a simple NAS configuration.

[trurl]

Cache is not required and can be added later if you decide you have use for it.