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Thinking of downsizing my NAS server

So I've squeezed all 4 drives in this mini ITX case "only has two internal 3.5" slots. I am actually surprised, it only draws 54 watts with 4 drives idle. It used that much power with two drives and the old C2D motherboard. So I setup the drives in Raidz2 and copied a large folder "130GB" of random stuff back and forth. It had no problems saturating the Realtek GigE >100MB/s on the large files both to and from the array with LZ4 enabled. it was right at 30 minutes both ways. I tested with the intel nic and it took 30 minutes to copy that data to the array and 24 minutes to read it from the array. With that being said, I'm still up in the air over using the Intel NIC OR installing the PCI-e SATA3 card and using the 60GB SATA3 SSD for L2ARC cache. Would saving reads to the hard disks improve longevity? I can see most of my daily working data fitting in this 60GB cache so it could be beneficial in that sense. I've run multiple passes of Seatools and MHDD on these drives so I trust them with my data.. I'm just waiting on this last question before I complete the setup and move my data over to this new box.
 
black6spdz said:
I'm still up in the air over using the Intel NIC OR installing the PCI-e SATA3 card and using the 60GB SATA3 SSD for L2ARC cache. Would saving reads to the hard disks improve longevity? I can see most of my daily working data fitting in this 60GB cache so it could be beneficial in that sense. I've run multiple passes of Seatools and MHDD on these drives so I trust them with my data.. I'm just waiting on this last question before I complete the setup and move my data over to this new box.
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You should max the RAM (ARC) before even thinking about L2ARC. The L2ARC index needs to be stored in ARC eating into your already low amount of RAM. L2ARC is more for the situation where you already have lots of RAM and need good IOPS. Wouldn't consider it for a normal home file/media server.
 
well if/when I find a good deal on a couple 8GB sticks I'll put 16GB into it.. but for now it is what it is. So you are saying adding the SSD cache would be detrimental to the system?
 
Mmh, you would be trading fast cache for a larger amount of slow cache. And that might be wasted unless your usage pattern is I/O heavy. Data that is accessed frequently gets thrown to the L2ARC. So if you're mainly using your file server for streaming movies it does nothing for you.
 
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I agree that RAM is magnitudes faster than a SATA3 attached SSD, but with the bottleneck of all NAS devices being the network interface, as long as the cache is faster than ~120MB/s "for a single GigE" I would think the IOPS improvement of even slower flash based memory over RAM would be win/win. Am I understanding something incorrectly?
 
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I would go ahead and start moving data now but during some testing I noticed when I put in the pci-e sata card and sdd that it shifted the drive names from ad0-3 to ad1-4 since the ssd took ad0. The array seemed to still function correctly but it looked to be confused since the drives listed in the vdev were ad1-2.nop and then just ad4. I don't want any gotchas after making this switch.
 
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