Best way to safely leverage unused SSD

TrueNAS General
1

I have a single, 250GB SSD in my TrueNAS Scale server that’s going unused. I have looked at some of the ZFS options for caching and logging, etc., but noticed that some of them have major implications on the entire pool if the additional storage were to become unavailable.

Now it’s a new SSD, but I’m trying to be very safe. Is there a good way to leverage this unused drive without sacrificing pool integrity/availability should it fail somehow? Otherwise, it’s a small’ish drive going unused in the server.

Thanks for any advice.

2

That depends entirely on your usecase, so without knowing more about what you do with your nas it’s very hard to tell.

3

As far as I know, a cache vdev is the only auxiliary vdev that would match those criteria.
Although I would only recommend adding a cache if your workload involves repeated reads to files that are bigger than memory.

4

Depending on your use case : As a Metadata only L2ARC.

Slog is only for sync writes (VMs, Databases, NFS, ISCSI) and then you want a SSD with PLP or an Optane.