My system’s MB has six sata ports, all of which are occupied by 8TB drives which I named the incredibly creative “pool1”. I also have two nvme slots, both filled with 256GB drives, which I decided to do a mirror boot pool thing when I initially installed TrueNAS. So, if you don’t count some USB ports, all my drive spots are filled on my motherboard.
My apps are on my huge pool with the platter drives.
I’ve seen a lot of “how do I” threads about partitioning the boot drives to move apps to them, and how that’s not supported, and some surrounding debate around that. Since I’m so much of a beginner and am learning as I go here, I really don’t want to delve into unsupported territory.
Would I be better off making my boot pool just the one drive and making the other SSD drive my apps drive? Would I be best to just leave things as they are?
I’d appreciate any insight or direction anyone can offer. Thanks.
The app pool gets more activity than the boot pool, so there should be a benefit to moving to a single boot device (just keep a copy of the configuration file…) and a single drive SSD app pool (replicate to HDD pool).
To mirror the app pool, put the boot drive in a USB adapter.
First question, IMHO: better than what? Are you not satisfied with the performance you currently have?
Yes, SSDs are faster than spinning drives, but are your apps “slow”? If everything is running to your satisfaction, why change? Most data is cached in RAM, anyway.
IMHO a separate app pool while nice to have is a micro optimisation that is not really necessary in many scenarios. Geeks tend to do such things
Could it be a good practice to free the work to the main pool? I want to create a Emby, Adguard and Home Assistant server. Is not a better option to create a boot stripe pool, app stripe pool and a Raidz?
It helps if you give us a detailed hardware listing. Do you have something you have right now or is this planning and you haven’t bought any hardware?
Typical example would be
boot_pool is a SSD1
Apps_pool is SSD2 & SSD3 in a Mirror VDEV
Data_pool is VDEV of hard drives, Mirror or Raid-Z(1,2,3) setup all depend on your needs. IOPS, writes or read speeds desired
A SSD (adapted) into a PCIe slot is necessarily of NVMe type, so I’m not sure what you mean here, or what you think that “PCIe” and NVMe" mean…
The boot device does not need much. If you have a PCIe x1 or x2 slot, this is the perfect fit.
Otherwise, boot from the type of connector you need less:
From a NVMe port (PCIe slot or M.2…) to keep all of your SATA ports for the data pool.
Or from a SATA port if you’re building a large NVMe pool…
