Need help planning storage for small home system

[lonelytourist]

Hi, I have two servers - the TS140 (Xeon E3 1245v3, 24GB ECC) and a much lower-powered HP N40L (AMD Turion II Neo, 12GB). Until this week, I was running ESXi on the TS140, but wiped the drives and am starting over with Proxmox.

One requirement is a sane and foolproof backup plan. I'm not sure how to configure these two systems so that my backups are safe, and the disks have a nice balance of performance / reliability.

Drives I Own:

• (2x) 4TB WD Red
• (1x) 1TB WD Black
• (1x) 1TB Seagate Barracuda
• (2x) 120GB HP M700 SSDs (new)
  
• (1x) 180GB Intel SSD
• (1x) 120GB SSD Kingston: this drive is degraded, bad blocks according to SMART
• (1x) 120GB SSD Sandisk

Considering Purchasing, depending on plans:

• (2x) 1TB WD black, for RAIDZ2 or RAID10
• Possibly another 4TB Red if I decide to RAID5 or RAIDZ1 those
• HBA controller (model unknown)

Caveats:

• Only 5 SATA ports on TS140 motherboard
• TS140 has a 9260-8i RAID controller which cannot be flashed to IT mode to passthrough like an HBA. I will have to sell this and get an HBA if I need more than 5 SATA ports for ZFS. Otherwise it can be used to create RAID / LVM volumes (non-ZFS) on the TS140.
• Some of the drives are very old (Kingston SSD, Sandisk). Status reporting is fine except for the Kingston.

I have brainstormed a few options for how I could set this equipment up.

Scenario 1:
Proxmox with SSD RAIDz2, local backups RAID10, and a separate backup server with ZFS-mirroring

TS140: Proxmox

• OS/Primary Storage:
  • RAIDZ2
    • (4x) 120gb SSD
    • No separate L2ARC/SLOG
• Local Backups/extra space:
  • RAID10, LVM, 4x1TB
  • hardware raid on LSI MegaRAID card
  • extra space would be allocated only to stuff that I'm not worried about losing, if this backup array happens to go down

N40L: FreeNAS

• ZFS-mirrored (like RAID 1)
  • (2x) WD Red 4TB
  • 180GB SSD for L2ARC or SLOG? (I read that SLOG needs a write-optimized SSD, and most general purpose SSDs are read optimized)
• provides ZFS over iSCSI shares to Proxmox (there's a 3rd party adapter, would need to test it and make sure it works)
• Can always do NFS for backups if ZFS over iSCSI doesn't work
• possibly other uses

Scenario 2:
Ditch the N40L, everything on TS140. Keep the hardware raid and don't use ZFS for disks on that card.

TS140: Proxmox

• OS/Primary Storage:
  • RAIDz2 (4x1TB)
  • 1x180GB SSD - L2ARC
  • These 5 drives on motherboard SATA ports
• Backups (multiple volumes available for backup):
  • RAID1-2x4TB WD RED
  • RAID5-3x120GB SSD
  • Don't think these would be ZFS

Scenario 3:
Swap current LSI 9260-8i with a proper HBA card for additional passthrough SATA ports

TS140: Proxmox

• OS/Primary Storage:
  • RAIDz2 (4x1TB)
  • 120GB L2ARC SSD
  • 120GB ZIL SSD
• Remote backups (ZFS over iSCSI or NFS)

N40L: FreeNAS

• ZFS-mirrored (like RAID 1)
  • (2x) WD RED 4TB
  • 180GB SSD SLOG
  • 120GB SSD L2ARC

I'm really not sure what the best option is here. Any tips? I plan to host containers for software development and application testing on the proxmox machine, maybe play with kubernetes (inside VMs).