Benefit to having apps on their own drives?

Apps and Virtualization
1

My TrueNAS Core boot drive failed so I’ve taken the opportunity to migrate over to SCALE. I’m at the point where it’s time to set up my apps again and I’m wondering what the best practice is on where to place them.

Previously I had them on the same pool as my data. Maybe I’m overthinking this but is there a reliability benefit to having the apps on their own drives? My main pool is made up of spinners and supposedly apps tend to constantly write to the drives. Will this increase wear?

I’m out of SATA ports on my current cobbled together system, which is getting a little long in the tooth, but if there is a tangible benefit to moving the apps onto their own pool I’d consider rebuilding it…

Or am I just being stupid here and fretting about nothing?

2

Simple:
For APPS, really try to only use SSD or NVME.
Install and update times will go down big time.

For me, it’s better to have LESS pools/ssd/nvme/hdd, as long as I have a mirror, or a replication to another media, plus another NAS, of the data.

So I usually have a Main NAS, with mirror HDDs for bulk data and single SSD/NVME for apps, containers and VMs.

But I snapshot and replicate that data several times a day to a local ssd/nvme, plus another secondary NAS, ready to take over the primary if needed.

As long as you have a backup, and you can afford a couple of hours of “non-replicated” data, you are ok.

In your particular case, with no SATA ports available, simply install TN in a USB-3 external SSD enclosure and boot from it and use the SATA port where you had the boot drive as your APPS drive.

(since Scale, almost all my TN servers with APPS have TN installed on an external USB SSD. Only ever problem was a cheap no-brand SSD that died. 15 min later and new SSD and server is back up).

3

hmmm, food for thought. I’m a little leery of using a USB anything as a system device… I’ll have to ponder that one.

In the meantime, other than app performance, is there any good reason I can’t put it on my main data pool?

4

Not really.

I like having my apps and vms on mirrored ssds; performance difference was noticeable for me.

I eventually even moved it to mirrored nvme; performance difference was less noticeable, but freed up some sata ports for other uses.

5

I also think that put apps on SSD/NVME have as consequence that the access to rust disks will be reduced, this impact more or less depending on APM ecc, but generally Is good both for power consumption/noise/heat and HD life. SSD and NVME are not impacted by those things instead