zfs raidz or raid10 or both?

[JinxCappa]

This might be a long post. I am currently building a new server to replace ESXi with SmartOS.

I currently have 4 - 2TB drives of uncertain origin in a raid10. I believe 2 are greens and maybe a black and a Seagate. I recently purchased 4 Seagate 3TB NAS drives so I will have 8 HDD's in total. My question is this:

I run Plex in a VM and created a universal pool at the moment running on a separate box using OmniOS. I do like the idea of using a raid10 setup for my zones and KVM. I am almost at full capacity with most of my data being media. So for my new build should I:

A: Just do a big raid 10 stripping across 4 mirrors?

B: Create a single pool with 2 vdevs of raidz1 stripped?

C: Create 2 pools. One raid10 for zones and KVM. One raidz1 for just media files. (I'm completely fine with single disk failure as media is not that important)

Currently I have an old ssd as a slog and bought a new Intel s3500 for the new box. If running separate pools I can have separate slogs.

I'm leaning to C only because of space increase with raidz1. My only concern is that that pool will be shared with plex,sabnzbd, and transmission so the iops with downloading and possibly transcoding up to 4-5 simultaneous clients has me a bit concerned. If I share the pool via NFS I know the ssd will help but that's why I'm on here now looking for suggestions. Thanks in advance.

For the curious I'm will be running dual x5680's with 48GB of ram and I have a m1015 and LSI hba running in IT mode. So CPU and ram usage isn't much of an issue with transcoding and what not.

 

[danswartz]

I vote for C. VM I/O will tend to be read-intensive and random, and raid10 rocks for that. For media, which tends to stream, raidz* sequential is good enough.