I have decided to try openmediavault from running unraid forever. Mostly because of the debian base and more freedom to do stuff manually while having an UI that does help so feel I have outgrown unraid since I want to have more os control. Truenas scale I dont think I will do as I want pure docker-compose control without having to setup a VM or something to host docker.

I kinda dont want this post to be a unraid vs omv vs truenas vs proxmox vs whatever, but about drive setup.

Regardless, here is my current disks that I will run.

2x 2TB enterprise NVME

10X 10TB 7200RPM regular drives on a Broadcom LSI 9500

4X 8TB U.2 drives (very fast NVME drives in 2.5 size) on a Broadcom LSI 9400

With this setup I want to try to save power as its running around 200W as of today, and disk wear so doing some spindown at least.

I have some scenarios in my head.

1. use the 2x NVME for OMV base system
2. setup the 10X in a snapraid with with mergerfs in front
3. use 2x U2 drives as a cache frontend implemented in mergerfs
4. use 2x U2 drives for the highest impact IO (cache, databases etc to avoid FUSE on high IO)
5. All XFS file system

The second option is ZFS, but I am very new to ZFS except setting it up once with one pool for the 4X U2 and one pool for the 10X HDD, but that made everything on and no spin down. The performance was very good though, so absolutely a very high performance setup. I would not be against running ZFS, but I would like a suggestions for how to plan it. I will say that I have 128GB DDR4 3200 ram in the server, so RAM for the ARC cache for ZFS I do not think would be an issue (?)

Maybe someone got a different suggestion for disk layout?

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