I recently purchased a new NAS / Server and while I’m waiting for it to arrive I’m planning out my storage and RAID configurations.
I’ce mostly decided on using 5 20TB or 24TB drives in RAID z2 as my primary storage pool. I’ll just use a 500GB nvme as a read cache. But I still have a gen 4 by 4 nvme slot available, and I’m considering buying a stupidly large nvme drive to put in it.
Problem is, I want some fault tolerance, so I’m wondering if I can just make a virtual drive in my primary pool and use a RAID mirror between the nvme and the virtual drive to make my secondary pool.
Would this work? Or would the performance overhead and instibility make this a fool’s errand?
Could you elaborate on why the read cache won’t work? I’m aware of the high RAM requirement, and plan to allocate 40GB to the L2ARC. Or is there some other bottleneck I’m not aware of?
These things are expensive, so I’d appreciate any info.
My thought process for the mirroring is that in the event the nvme fails, the pool will remain accessible, just extremely slow in comparison to previously, and it’ll be easier for me to replace than if I just made regular backups to the primary storage pool.
I won’t write a novel, but using L2ARC for anything is pretty pointless unless you’re doing constant reads on multiple large objects at once, and you’re consistently transferring them. More memory is always the first thing that will improve performance, partially because it’s just faster, but also because the filesystem you’re going to be running on (especially ZFS) already does its own caching, which is faster/better.
If this is just a home setup, and not something serving a database or video editing workspace, you won’t get any real benefit from dedicating an entire SSD to just caching.
Thanks for the info! I didn’t realize that ZFS already does caching. I guess I’ll use those two nvme slots for two identical drives for my secondary pool then.