First time FreeNAS config help

[Generic George]

So I have a x10sdv-7tp4f that I'm using for the motherboard.

Two 32gb samsung thumb drives mirrored for boot.

I have four of the 8tb Red HDDs for the primary mass storage.

Two samsung 843 960 gb, intended for the "Fast" portion of storage.

Misc collection of SSDs (250 gb 960 evo, 256 gb 840 Evo) that could be used.

I'm planning on picking up some more SSDs and was eventually planning on getting about 4tb of usable SSD storage once prices start getting back to something reasonable.

Eventually I'm going to pick up the recommended drives for stuff like the L2arc and ZIL, but I was wondering what was the best set up for the drives I have currently? I've got a 10gbe link to my primary machine, so I'm not dealing with a 1gbe link as the primary limiting factor.

 

[nitrobass24]

I was in a similar situation and I ended up with Two Pools

RaidZ2 of 6x 8TB drives
Mirro of 2x S3710 SSDs

At one point I considered using the SSDs for an L2ARC for the HDD Pool, but ultimately I was not going to see much benefit since l2ARC is not read-ahead and most of my read use-cases are streaming media which the HDD can handle quite easily. I ended up selling off my misc SSDs to buy extra HDDs and a ZuesRAM for ZIL.

 

[CJRoss]

Unless you're doing VMs or NFS you don't need a ZIL. And I just turned sync off for NFS. Any transfers that fail I will know about and can just restart.

Most users don't need L2ARC either.