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QNAP TS-664 has arrived, HDD config advice

#1
Hey thanks for all your videos, it's really helped after researching for 6 months on what would be best for my very first NAS. The QNAP TS-664 finally arrived last night and it's ready to be populated, though I can wait for Black Friday sales so not in a rush to buy drives at the moment.

Use cases will be file server (home and business), media/Plex server, surveillance, backup, scratch, and eventually virtual machines. I plan to utilize it all!

The NAS will be connected to my home network (TrendNet 2.5gbe switch is up and running). Once the QM2-2P10G1TB is back in stock, I will add a 10gbe link between my primary machine and the NAS for faster transfers.

I also care more about redundancy and safety nets rather than parity/striping. I plan on using an m.2 drive cache for higher transfer speeds. Of course I will still have scheduled backups to external drives for offsite. (3-2-1!)

My question to you is regarding drive configuration and if the following setup would be ideal, or if there's a better way to do this:

Bay 1 & 2 - a pair of WD RED 12TB (RAID 1) as primary file server for both home and business use. This pool may be designated into multiple volumes.
Bay 3 & 4 - a pair of WD BLACK 8TB (RAID 1) as media server (audio/video/photo/Plex).
Bay 5 - one WD PURPLE 8TB to drive two or three IP home surveillance cameras. Redundancy not important here.
Bay 6 - one WD GOLD 16TB that would house all backups (macOS Time Machine, Windows backup as well as copies from the RED and BLACK drives.)

m.2 Slot A - WD RED 1TB for write-through caching, to make up for the lack of parity/striping
m.2 Slot B - WD BLACK 1TB for scratch disk to use with photo/video editing software

The QM2-2P10G1TB extension card with 10gbe also has two more m.2 slots, both of which would be populated with Samsung EVOs, one to hold temporary gaming data and the other to hold virtual machine disk images.

Have I gone off the rails here or does this sound like a reasonable solution to handle all my use cases? Thanks so much for your insight!
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#2
Yes, this setup works.
I would just highlight that a single M.2 stick will only allow read-cache. You will need a pair of M.2 for write cache.
I would also combine bay 1,2,3,4 as a RAID5. Black vs Red is not that significant. IOPS is what matters. Only 2.5inch SSD would give significant improvement.
Otherwise, File and Multimedia servers can be hosted on shared RAID under different volumes.
You may as well consider ruing OS and apps from SATA SSD or NVMe to improve performance further.


I hope this helps.
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