Adding SSD(s) to improve performance

TrueNAS General
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I have an old 4-bay HPE ML310e Gen8 running Dragonfish-24.04.2. 2x22TB WDC WD221KFGX mirrored (~20 TiB usable). So 2 empty drive bays. NAS & clients - everything on 10Gb ethernet.

Home / homelab environment with SMB shares, Time Machine backups, iSCSI, VMWare, etc. Not production or anything like that.

I have a few old (lightly used) Samsung SSD 850 PRO 512GB drives.

Would there be any value – or perhaps what would be the best way to use the SSD’s with this config?

I don’t currently have any additional VDEVs.
Metadata
Log
Cache
Spare
Dedup

I was originally going to create a new pool (striped or mirrored) just for fun, but when I went to do it I started wondering if using them as special VDEVs might be a better idea.

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Either a separate mirrored pool for apps and VMs.

OR as a mirrored metadata VDev, which will speed up all the file traversal etc, and your apps, and probably VMs too.

For best results replicate your pool somewhere and back again to populate the metadata devices.

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How much RAM does your system have?

Or rebalance the pool.

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Which wouldn’t do much for any VMs

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32GB. I think that’s the max for this hardware.

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Then @Stux gave you all the options!

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I kind of played with a separate mirrored pool, but it’s only ~450GB and the iSCSI wizard limits me to 80% or ~380GB. Not terribly useful.

I ordered a couple of 4TB WD Red SATA SSD’s to play with instead.

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For best performance is reccomended 50%. Resource - The path to success for block storage | TrueNAS Community

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