Hi,

I am considering purchasing a 4 or 5 bay NAS to 1) Setup a Media (FLAC files) / Photos / File share (sketchup, Adobe, Lightroom, DAW project files). 2) Backup the media volumes. Although I have been reading about various setups I am seeing conflicting information and running circles in the documentation. So, I'd like to ask a few questions here.

1) SHR vs Raid-1, Multiple Storage Pools vs Multiple Volumes:

I was thinking about having 2 storage pools. 2-drive in a RAID (SHR or Raid1?) for the media volume. And 2-drives in another Raid (SHR or Raid1?) for backing up the first 2-drives and (if possible) adding Time Machine/Desktop backups for non media files on other home devices. Does this make sense vs having all the drives on a single SHR pool with multiple volumes?

I am still researching HyperBackup, snapshot replication and SHR...

2) Would adding a 1-2TB SATA SSD as an application storage volume improve performance for the media server?

3) Is NVME read/write cache beneficial for this setup (lots of conflicting info...)? DS1522 can support 2 SSDs...

I think that is it for now. I probably have more questions on the networking side, but Ill save that for a different thread once I know what I want to do