Storage Recommendation

[Enquiries]

Dear team,

I love your channel & blog and finally got inspired for my next project: Bought a Aoostar WTR MAX with 96GB RAM.
I'd need your advice on buying the right storage for my NAS since I'm overwhelmed with the options.

While I have not yet decided for the OS (most likely TrueNas with HexOS since OpenSource)
the usecase is clearer: I will use the NAS first for some Jellyfin, Immich & PC/File backup, I plan to expand to Nextcloud for myself and extended family as well as Homeassistant with Voice sometime next year as well as lab for VMs.

I plenty spare cash from recent consulting projects and want to make sure I find a good balance between speed, reliability & energy while going for a high amount of storage to future proof. Happy to pay a premium if I get high reliability and storage density without entering luxury territory. I am thinking Seagate Exos 20TB based on your configurator but looking to get your perspective. On the other bays - no clue - what would you recommend?

Thx

[ed]

Thanks for supporting the channel, and congrats on picking up the Aoostar WTR Max — with 96GB RAM you’ve got a very strong base for TrueNAS or HexOS.

For your use case (Jellyfin, Immich, PC backups, later Nextcloud, Home Assistant, and VM lab work), the balance is between bulk reliable capacity and some faster tiers for caching or active workloads.

For the main storage pool, Seagate Exos 20TB is an excellent choice. They give you the best $/TB at that high density, are designed for 24/7 operation, and have proven reliability. A RAIDZ2 (similar to RAID 6) of 6–8 drives would give you both high usable capacity and the ability to lose two drives safely.

On the SSD side, I’d suggest using a pair of enterprise-grade NVMe SSDs (Samsung PM9A3, Kioxia CD6, or even Kingston DC1500M) for either a mirrored metadata/special devices vdev or for VM/scratch storage. This way your containers, VMs, and indexing-heavy apps (like Immich) stay snappy and don’t bog down the HDD pool. Even 1–2TB per drive is plenty for that layer.

If you want to add read cache, you can use a couple of smaller NVMe SSDs, but with 96GB of RAM your ARC cache in memory will already cover most needs. Better to put SSDs toward metadata or fast pools rather than L2ARC unless you know you’ll need it.

For energy efficiency, stick with fewer, larger HDDs (like the 20TB Exos) rather than many smaller drives. You get lower drive count, lower idle draw, and less wasted space as your dataset grows.

So, in short:
• Bulk pool: Seagate Exos 20TB in RAIDZ2 for the backbone storage
• Fast pool: 2 x enterprise NVMe SSDs for VMs, metadata, or scratch work
• Skip consumer SSDs if you want long-term reliability — the endurance difference matters under TrueNAS workloads

That mix should future-proof you nicely, keep energy reasonable, and give you the flexibility to serve both your lab and family without hitting performance bottlenecks.