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@ Aida
2025-06-09 07:31:03
First big props to you for selecting the best Open Storage Solution out there. Now to your question.
I think it would be ideal to have two data pools on the machine (plus the boot-pool).
One smaller, faster and a bit less resilient dedicated to active projects, photo editing, video cutting, etc. The two mirrored 4TB SSDs would be ideal for that. I'm not sure if you will be able to achieve speeds better than the USB attached SSD that depends on the network and drives, but it will be much more secure with the mirrors and snapshots in place.
And the second utilizing the 16TB drivers. I would start with 4 of them set in RAIDZ2. That setup will allow for recovering from failure of up to two drives, giving you ~32TB of usable storage and what is very important making you future proof. Because then you can expand this pool without the need to shuffle data around. You will be able to plug in 5th and then 6th drive and just expand the pool on them. Giving you 48TB or 64TB of usable space respectively. On this drive you can store your backups as well as your family cloud data.
Things to consider:
1) Creating backup strategy. Raid itself is not a backup solution. Ideal would be to use ZFS send and receive to push snapshots to a different machine preferably in a different place. Or to the cloud. Look at TrueCloud Backup for example.
2) ECC support, without ECC memory there is unlikely, but posible complete catastrophic pool failure due to an uncorrected memory error.