Hello,
I'm looking for advice on the selection of storage devices for the NAS I'm planning.
Currently I have 3 TB of movies and series, 16 GB of data stored in cloud services, 30 GB of archived documents and 65 GB of private pictures which I'd like to store in the NAS.
At the moment the bulk of the data is stored on one internal 3 TB HDD and one external 3 TB HDD.
In the future I'd like to attach the external HDD to a Raspberry Pi at another location to backup my cloud data, documents and pictures.
For the NAS I'm planning to go with a Asrock J4105-ITX board and a Fractal Design Node 304 case—providing four SATA ports and six 2.5"/3.5" bays.
I've planned to buy two used WD Red 6 TB drives from different batches and use them together with the 3 TB drive I already have as storage drives with snapRAID and mergerFS.
They would store my movies and series as well as the archived documents and private picture, because they are all changed and accessed infrequently.
My question is which hardware for the boot drive and cloud data would be best for my use case.
Because I'd like to minimize the usage of my mechanical drives and snapRAID dislikes frequently changed data, I prefer to not store the cloud data on the storage drives.
Instead I have thought about using a partitioned SSD for boot drive and cloud data as well as running OMV from a flash drive with a separate SSD or second flash drive for the data.
With my initial setup I'd have the SATA port for the SSD available—leaving me with only the PCI-E slot with a SATA adapter for future storage expansion.
Could such an adapter cause problems if I connect the cloud data SSD or a snapRaid-managed HDD to it?
The flash drive is often recommended as a boot drive because of the ease to backup and restore the system.
What possibilities would I have with a partitionened boot/data drive in that regard?
Which of the proposed setups would you recommend?
I'd be grateful for any other suggestions to improve my proposed plans as well.
Thank you for your help! 