u/BedtimeBogey

I'm currently running two Minisforum N5 Pro's (two separate locations) with replication tasks. I currently have four 24TB drives in Unit1 and two 24TB drives in Unit2. So far, I've setup two vdevs with a striped mirror in the first box, giving two 24TB pools with a mirror for each. The second box has a single drive replicating each of the Unit1 vdevs... giving three drives of replicated data in two locations.

I just acquired two more 24TB drives, and I'm considering getting two more to completely fill the N5's with ten 24TB drives. This is causing me to re-think my current vdev/pool strategy. I love the double redundancy, but I think using three 24TB drives to yield one 24TB pool is a bit low on the capacity usage, especially given these are already in separate boxes/locations. Would it be best to run a Raid Z1 or Z2 across five 24TB drives in a single N5 and then just replicate everything to the other N5? I assume my data transfer rates would also increase if I'm writing to multiple RAID drives vs a single striped mirror. Thoughts?

I'm running TrueNAS 25.10.3.1 on two Miniforum's N5 Pros at two locations. My Source location has 2G symmetrical nternet connection with a 10GBe NIC. My Destination location has 8G symmetrical internet connection with a 10GBe NIC. They are connecting via Tailscale. I'm getting 65-70 MB/s between my striped-mirror HDD pools at the Source to my single drive pool at the Destination. All drives in all pools are Seagate Exos 24TB. From a configuration and settings stand-point, is there any way to speed up the replication throughput (SSD slog, etc)? Is this a reasonable replication speed for HDD-to-HDD transfers?

Forgive me if this is covered elsewhere, but I can't find any info on configuring child datasets. Specifically, I have multiple datasets on a TrueNAS (25.10.3.1, latest stable) pool. I'll use the following path as an example:

/pool/dataset1/dataset2/folder

First, in my path example, do we ever consider folders / sub-folders in TrueNAS, or are these always child-datasets? I know I can create folders on the share, but do I actually configure SMB's or permissions at the folder level (not withstanding Linux console commands)?

Second question with regards to sharing... if I want to share dataset2 or the sub-folder as an SMB share, do I need to have a parent-level SMB share active on dataset1? What is the proper configuration, if I only need to share the sub-folder level?

Third question with regards to permissions... if I wanted to do a user-specific encrypted share at the folder or child datasets (dataset2, etc) levels, how do I set the encryption and permission parameters for the parent levels? I know I want to avoid inheriting permissions, but I've not been successful at gaining access to specific sub-folders.

Ultimately, I want to have a "users" folder with subfolders (or child datasets) by user name. The users folder would only contain folder names aligned with each specific user... such as /pool/users/frank and /pool/users/mark. The users folder only contains the sub-folders and doesn't need to have it's own share, unless necessary. Per question 2, what is the proper configuration and permissions for the "users" folder on the parent level? How do I set the permissions and encryption so everyone can access parent level "users" folder to see the user-specific subfolders (or child datasets), but only access their own user-specific encrypted subfolder (or dataset)?

Thanks!