Sorry for the very long post, I am a meticulous person and I tried to cover everything about the question I wanted to ask.
Okay let me begin by saying I am a very technical or very tech savvy guy but I have very limited to no experience in IT and servers and etc. I have multiple questions but before asking those I will give info about the situation I am in. So I have an old machine (Dell Optiplex 790 MT) with i7-2600 (3.4-3.8 GHz) (non k variant) 16GB of RAM and a GTX 960 (MSI 4GB gaming edition). Additionally for storage I have: 1 x 500GB SATA SSD, another 2TB SATA SSD (TeamGroup CX2) and 1 x 2TB HDD (Seagate Constellation ES.3). Now I know that I will need more HDDs for storage as well as reliability (loosing 1 disk etc. stuff) Finally I also have an SATA HDD/SSD Carrier module to make a regular SSD into a External USB SSD.
One important thing to note here (and this is why I am mentioning I have a USB External Carrier/Case for SSD) is that my Motherboard only has 4 SATA ports and only one of them has the capability of SATA III speeds, the other 3 are SATA II. So I am looking for the most optimal way to set it up.
I also want to explain my use case: So I have been messing around with Proxmox Hypervisor, and I have set up a few minecraft servers, as well as tried to set up Plex (only to get really confused and give up in the end). I am willing to learn more but I also want this server to be operational in the meantime. I know for a fact that I will be messing with some containers and VMs with the TrueNAS side of HEX_OS. But I really want to have my Plex and Immich to run reliably as I learn more about the other server stuff.
So here are the questions:
- What would be the ideal storage approach? Should I connect the low capacity SSD as the main OS drive (connected to SATA III) , and get 1 or 2 more HDDs and make a pool with 2 or 3 HDDs (on SATA II) and connect the 2TB SSD from USB.
Follow-up question: If let's say I set up the Plex Server so that my Media (mostly Tv Series/Shows and Movies) live in External SSD, would that affect the performance in a significant way. (I am not trying to go for an ideal/excellent solution) But I want a solution that is acceptable and convenient. (meaning I will obviously not try to watch 4k 120Hz or higher crazy bitrate etc. stuff. I am trying maybe 4k 60, mostly 2k 60, and sometimes even 1080p stuff)
- When I am setting up the storage, (lets say I went with the config described above, 1 SATA SSD, 3 SATA HDDs, and the external 2TB USB SSD, will I have the choice of how much total storage vs how many disks i can loose at once? The different "z configs" i suppose? (Please let me know if this is not the proper name for it, i want to learn)
So for example do i get to choose
A) 3 mirror copies of 2TB or
B) 4TB total storage with 1 disk to loose?
And additionally I have read some posts on reddit that say, you also need a SSD for caching, seperate from the pool and the os disks, so how should i approach to that then, should i give up on 3 hdd pool to have a caching ssd? How much cache do I need for caching for a given amount of total storage?
I am asking this as my hardware is ready other than the additional HDD(s) I need to buy and I am really excited about it.j
Thank you for reading it all the way and sorry for the trouble!
