We're looking to upgrade our storage from a thunderbolt 2 Drobo 5D (with a QNAP TS-509 II NAS as backup), to a ZFS based NAS as the primary storage via a 10gbe connection.
Use cases:
- 4k video editing on Davinci Resolve - so read heavy streaming workloads
- Lightroom photo cataloging and editing - fairly large catalogue - medium sized random reads and writes
- VFX compositing (Nuke, Natron) - medium sized random reads and writes
- VFX 3d rendering (Blender, Houdini) - medium sized random reads and writes
- Nextcloud synced backup for home dirs and other data - smaller sized random reads and writes
I'm interested in ZFS due to the reported fast version snapshots, fast compression, self-healing/bitrot protection, industry prooven read and write caching options.
The TS-h973AX appeals as it's a fairly sweet price-point compared to the feature set. The main downside I can see is the lack of upgradability.
But that said as long as it can be set up to reliably saturate the 10gbe network I think it should hopefully do the trick for the next 5 or so years.
I can see in the product blurb that it should be able to hit 1167Mb/s which is close to the 10gbe saturation point, using 2 Samgsung 850 500Gb ssd + 2 U.2 ssds.
My Questions are:
- What is the minimum disk cache disk configuration needed to hit that performance? Given I will have 5 x 6Tb Ironwolf 7200 rpm SATA disks in a zraid1 - i.e one disk of redundancy
- Which ssd is used for what cache? i.e in QNAPs example benchmark, are the Samsung 850s used in a mirrored raid1 for the ZIL and the U.2s used for the L2ARC or vise verse? I've also seen some opinions that you don't need to bother with ZIL caching?
- I was thinking of using a single fast M.2 500gb for the read cache (L2ARC?) via a QDA-UMP U.2 converter. Would that surfice?
Many thanks in advance!