I posted about choosing SSDs vs HDDs earlier, and have narrowed my options down to one of two. As a summary of the background, I’m building myself a multi-use NAS (mostly as a second-copy backup server for important data, or first-copy infrequent access for other stuff). I’m thinking of setting up either:
Option 1: 2x4 TB hard drives in a mirror configuration + an NVME SSD for l2arc
Option 2: 6x1 TB SSDs in a Z2 configuration.
I currently have about 1-2 TB I want to store, but have decided on 4 TB as a useful capacity balance right now. I don’t envision that data amount to grow very quickly. Both of these options cost about the same in my area (the SSD option costs only 50$ more).
For the actual computer I have a Ryzen 3700x and 32 GB of memory.
I’m leaning towards option 2 due to better speed, noise and reliability of flash storage, but I don’t know if that configuration is a bad idea for some reason. It would eat up all the SATA ports on my motherboard, but I imagine that by the time I need more storage, I’ll need to rework the drive setup anyway.
I have not found L2 ARC to be much of a benefit for most of the time.
How many disk bays does the system have and how much storage to you need?
May not be a bad idea to make an HDD pool as large-volume backup target and a an SSD pool for data you want to store and access remotely