>The part I'm confused about is the focus on NVMe devices - do you also have a bunch of SATA/SAS SSDs
I do have 4 regular SATA spinning disks (enterprise-class), for bulk data storage, in a RAIDZ1 array. I know it's not as safe as RAIDZ2, but I thought it'd be safe enough with only 4 disks, and I want to keep power usage down if possible.
I'm using (right now) a single 512GB NVMe drive for both booting and app storage, since it's so much faster. The main data will on the spinners, but the apps themselves on the NVMe which should improve performance a lot. It's not mirrored obviously, so that's one big reason I'm asking about the NVMe slots; sticking a 2nd NVMe drive in this system would actually slow it down, since the 2nd slot is only PCIe3 and connected through the chipset, so I'm wondering if people do something different, like using some kind of adapter card for the x16 video slot. I just haven't seen any good recommendations online in this regard. For now, I'm just doing daily syncs to the raid array, so if the NVMe drive suddenly dies somehow, it won't be that hard to recover, though obviously not nearly as easy as with a mirror. This obviously isn't some kind of mission-critical system so I'm ok with this setup for now; some downtime is OK, but data loss is not.
I do have 4 regular SATA spinning disks (enterprise-class), for bulk data storage, in a RAIDZ1 array. I know it's not as safe as RAIDZ2, but I thought it'd be safe enough with only 4 disks, and I want to keep power usage down if possible.
I'm using (right now) a single 512GB NVMe drive for both booting and app storage, since it's so much faster. The main data will on the spinners, but the apps themselves on the NVMe which should improve performance a lot. It's not mirrored obviously, so that's one big reason I'm asking about the NVMe slots; sticking a 2nd NVMe drive in this system would actually slow it down, since the 2nd slot is only PCIe3 and connected through the chipset, so I'm wondering if people do something different, like using some kind of adapter card for the x16 video slot. I just haven't seen any good recommendations online in this regard. For now, I'm just doing daily syncs to the raid array, so if the NVMe drive suddenly dies somehow, it won't be that hard to recover, though obviously not nearly as easy as with a mirror. This obviously isn't some kind of mission-critical system so I'm ok with this setup for now; some downtime is OK, but data loss is not.
Thanks for the advice!