I'm building a new little NAS. I've got no big requirements in terms of space (8 TB would be fine, the more the better of course) and I've got doubts deciding which way to go. I already have a 4TB Crucial MX500 SATA SSD and the idea was to spend another €400 in drives. After investigating I've got two main options:

1. Buy another two 4TB SSD (€380) units to have three and configure that RAIDz1
2. Buy three HGST HUH721010ALE601 10TB (€390), configure them in RAIDz1 and have more storage

Does that first option make sense, or I should just go with traditional disks? The purpose of the build is to run TrueNAS/Unraid (I'd maybe give Proxmox a go) to manage photos (with Photoprism, Photostructure, or some other alternative, I plan to test a few) and run several containers with Jellyfin etc, maybe some virtual machines to play with ocassionally.

I'm building a DIY NAS following pretty much Wolfgang's YouTube video with its efficient build. I've got everything clear except for the selection of disks. I don't have specially high requirements, but the idea is to buy three HDDs (between 12TB ad 16 TB depending on the offers) and configure them in RAIDz1 to have 24TB avalable and 1-drive failure. I'll make backups of some folders on them to an external drive from time to time.

I'm confused about using SSDs. Wolfgang's comments how he uses 1 TB SSD for each HDD, so I'd have to buy three of those to use them as cache, I guess. My question here is: Why three? Isn't just one (SSDs are much faster, so maybe one would suffice) enough? And why 1 TB and not save on this and buy maybe 512 or even 256GB ones if they just are used as a cache??

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One of the example configs the video recommends. Why 3 SSDs?

Hope some one can clarify this. I'd like to take advantage of Black Friday offers if I can find some. I'm using https://diskprices.com to monitor prices, but if you have any other good way to find good deals, please let me know. Thank you!

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