Consolidating Media Server and NAS into one TrueNAS box

ShadowChaser · April 24

If this belongs in Servers, NAS and Homelab I apologize

I have an all flash media server and an old NAS box that I want to consolidate for idle power draw reasons. Wondering if my setup is the best way to take advantage of all the hardware I have. I am going with TrueNAS Scale due to drivers for the SSDs not existing on FreeBSD.

The media server is a windows machine with some enterprise SSDs in a storage space. The NAS is running TrueNAS and has two mirrored pools (2x10 and 2x12TB).

I know I want to keep the following:

SuperMicro X10SDV-4C-TLN2F from the NAS for the low power Xeon-D and onboard 2x 10GbE
128GB of DDR4 ECC from the NAS since TrueNAS loves memory and I already have this motherboard maxed out
The HDD pools, 2x 10TB and 2x 12TB for 22TB of accessible spinning rust in total
The SSDs, 3x 3.2TB in RAIDZ1 for 6.4TB of accessible flash storage
The chassis and PSU from my NAS build as I can add more HDDs and a 550W PSU is plenty for the hardware I'm running

I'm trying to figure out how to set up a simpler boot pool and if I need metadata/slog/L2ARC drives. I have plenty of hardware for this, so here are some of the possibilities I'm envisioning.

-Boot Pool:

Reuse the mirrored boot pool from the NAS - 2x 128GB. They're old sata drives but they seem to keep kicking.
A single 16GB Optane SSD. It doesn't show up during TrueNAS setup which is why I haven't used it yet but I'm sure it just needs a driver. I don't like a single point of failure though so I don't think I'll go with this. I do have two but the board only has a single M.2 slot and I'm using all the PCIe lanes for the other SSDs and HBA.

-Add'l Devices:

I have plenty of spare NVMe devices that could be useful, but again this falls under the single point of failure thing since there's only 1 M.2 slot available.
To accelerate the HDD pool do I add a pair of SSDs for metadata? I have a matching pair of 860 Evos that aren't being used and if this is suitable for the task I'd love to load my picture archive faster.

I've tried reading the documentation on the various vdevs I can add to my pools to improve the performance of the spinners but I'm struggling to understand how to best take advantage of it all.