Hardware and Config Help for my specific case

[G0K4LP]

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!

 

[Dylan]

You're post is pretty dense but I'll try. I f you go with 500GB OS drive and 3x2TB (we'll get the the external USB SSD in a minute) would get you a raidz1 vdev with about ~3.6TB of usable storage and will be able to survive a single disk failure, Raidz2 requires at least 4 disks offering less capacity but can survive 2 disk failures. I was going to go down the rabbit hole of SATAII performance but unless you're other option is to pull the trigger on a new/different rig, you likely just need to run with this one. And that's cool, especially with HexOS still being in beta.

Now, about that external USB SSD thang. IF it were me I'd use that to either send snapshots to or better yet (because the OS is still in beta) keep my really important files backed up there (and maybe even in the cloud) until or unless you either decide to get a NAS supporting raidz2 when HexOS is no longer in beta and is as performant as well know/want it to be.

Here is some LIGHT READING because you like to learn.

Good luck!