Advise pls

[JoseM]

Hi, thanks in advance for your help!

 

My specs:

Motherboard: Asus h87m-pro

Processor: Intel i5 - INTEL Xeon D-1531

Ram: 10GB

PCIe SATA expansion card 4 ports - So, there are 10 SATA ports available.

 

I've successfully installed DSM 7.1 model DS3622xs+ using 6 SATA III 500GB HDDs in Raid 5 mode. Installed Home Assistant in a Virtual Machine, Jellyfin in Docker, Synology Drive, Photos, etc. Everything works ok, but I have been accessing movies through an external HDD.

 

It will be a home / family server, to store Documents and Family photos, as well as mobile synchronization. Furthermore, it will be running Home Assistant and Jellyfin as media server.

 

I've got 5 1Tb SSDs lying around and 1 8Tb HDD full of movies. My plan is dedicate the 5tb SSDs for documents and photos, as well as for Synology apps and then add the HDDs for movies and music.

 

Question 1. Jbod or Raid 5? for the documents and photos we don't want to loose. I know Raid 5 is redundant and if one disk dies I can recover it with another one. But considering they are SSDs, their lifespan and reliability is supposed to be longer. In any case, I will take backups regularly.

Question 2. If I first make a Storage pool and Volume 1 with the 5 SSDs, can I create another Storage pool for the HDDs in Jbod? These will be used for storing movies and music, I don't care if I loose them.

Question 3. Btrfs or exFAT? My guess is that as I am installing Virtual Machine I need Btrfs. Right? But what about the other Storage pool for the movies? can I use exFAT?

Question 4. With this model DS3622xs+ and my processor with integrated GPU, can I have transcoding? I've been testing it with my previous setup but I couldn't.

 

I'm open to any suggestion or advice.

 

Thanks

 

[blindspot]

Hi.

From my point of view:

Question 1. I would go with jbod. I think you know that raid is not a replacement for backup and raid 5 will wear ssd faster so if you have backups, the chance for one ssd to fail, if they are from a good known brand, it's unlikely. I have a jbod with 2 and 4  tb ssd and it's doing fine.

You can also install Petaspace, make storage pools and volume for each ssd and create a shared folder with Petaspace so that all ssd will be like one volume. With Petaspace, all data will be spread across all ssds, like one file on 1st ssd, second file on 2nd and so on. With jbod data is filled till the disk is full, then it moves to the second one.

Question 2. You can make any storage pool you need, but be advised, when created, all data stored will be deleted

Question 3. exFat is supported on external drives only. Internal you can have either btrfs or ext4. Btrfs is mandatory for virtual machine.

Question 4. AFAIK transcoding is available on DS918 only, which is a great platform, you can have as many disk as you like (almost, max is 24, i think)

One important aspect is hdd/ssd hibernation, so that drives wont spin/work all the time, check scemd log for errors.

Edited December 24, 2022 by blindspot

[JoseM]

Thanks blindspot for your quick answer. You have solved all my concerns.

When I said exFAT I meant ext4, Sorry.

I will install DS918 for transcoding.

 

Merry Xmas from Spain

[blindspot]

Merry Xmas to you too.