QNAP NAS Community Forum

I plan to get TS-873A. I currently have 5 Seagate Exos 8 TB SATA drives. I have 2 m.2 nvme 256 GB SSDs. I want to run QuTs Hero, ZFS.

I intend to add 8 GB ram to the NAS, making it a total of 16 GB. I plan to set up the 2 m.2 nvme 256 GB SSDs on the onboard m.2 slots, to use as system pool. I plan to install all 5 Seagate Exos in Raid Z1 configuration.

My files are Videos, to stream to Android TV box, laptops, desktops, and iPads. Photos, occasional viewing. Documents such as Word, Xlsx, PPT, and PDF.

I intend to run docker apps (sabnzbd, sonarr, radarr, emby server) and Qnap apps primarily for backup of desktops.

Is the configuration about right for my use purpose? Is the m.2 nvme (256 GB) enough? This is what I have on hand. Is adding just 8 GB enough to have inline dedup, inline compression (though I don't know if I need it).

In QuTS Hero, you can't add drives to a RAID group. New drives added later are made into a new RAID group.
For this reason, it might be worth the investment to get 8 HDDs to start out with and make RAID6.

256GB M.2 should be enough for the OS + apps + some containers. And I think this will work well with 16GB RAM as long as you don't use dedupe. What do you want to deduplicate? Some things dedupe well and some things don't. And then the feature may not be worth using.

I was thinking leaving the 3 bays open, later on, add another 2 Sata SSDs and enable SSD caching?

I think I have plenty of duplicates of photos, possibly home made videos, hence I want to dedupe. How much ram is required for dedupe? 32 GB?

Inline Dedupe needs about 1-5GB RAM per TB of data deduplicated. That assumes your folders have 128K block size. A smaller block size will make dedupe take more RAM.

How will you know how much TB of data deduplicated? Is this equivalent to your whole storage pool where you enabled deduplicated? Or whatever is actually deduplicated only? Assuming I will have 5x 8TB in Raid Z1, 32 TB will be in the pool. How much ram will I need to allot?