So my home server runs on average consumer hardware... i5 6400, 32GB RAM, cant remember motherboard model, Asus something, six SATA's onbaord with RAID available.
I run Proxmox for the Hypervisor, that won't be changing. The hypervisor and the virtual disks are on a pair of NVMe drives in RAID 1 - ultra-fast no issues with that.
I then have 4x WD Red drives that I have had since the beginning of time apparently - clocking up 48000+ hours each. They are in a ZFS 'raid 0' with a 128GB SSD cache drive - built within Proxmox. And then I have a FreeNAS VM where that array is mounted.
Problem is read/writes can be just abysmal and with the introduction of a 4K HDR TV, movie play back can suck sometimes unless its the only thing trying to do stuff to that disk array. The biggest issue is the massive variances in speeds I see - I assume when the SSD caches gets full the performance plummets. As reported by Windows, reads hover around 25MB/s but writes can plummet way down to 10-15MB/s.
The server has dual gigabit NIC's on a 802.3ad LAG.
So the two options I see are:
1) SSD's
4x Samsung 860 2TB drives - $401ea - $1604 (and use onboard SATA and onboard RAID, to do a RAID 5)
+ Hardware RAID card to reconnect the old 2TB drives for stuff that can be slow (photos, documents etc)
2) New HDD's & Hardware RAID
4x Ironwolf Pro's (they seem quite cheap for 'pro') 2TB - $221ea - $884
+ Hardware RAID card and do a RAID 5 set up?
At this point, I intend on ditching FreeNAS and probably go to OpenMediaVault as I don't think I get any benefit from ZFS and I can use a linux container rather than VM to spare up some RAM.
The NAS storage is really just for movies and TV, and some photo storage.
What would you do?
Considerations:
- I don't really want to spend the money on SSD's
- I don't care about redundancy - tv and movies aren't important. I know I'm talking about RAID 5, but the final goal is just better performance - if I achieve that without RAID, so be it.
- Will also probably stick a 10Gig network card in as I have SFP+'s on my switch.