Is it Okay to use Samsung Drives?

TrueNAS General
1

Hello Guys,

So, i’m planning to build a flash based NAS and i’ve a handful quantity of Samsung 990 PRO 1TB and 2 TB Drives. Are they safe enough to use with the TrueNAS?

On the old forum, there were so many posts about not using Samsung drives. DOes that still apply?

2

ZFS is fine with even unsafe drives. As long as they don’t lie about sync writes (some ADATA Phison firmware bug years ago) or just shutdown (some Samsung overheating shutdown instead of throttle bug).

But since these drives all come with firmwares and potentials errors, I would recommend you get if possible drives from different vendors and with different controllers.

And of course, like always: RAID is not a backup.

3

Small 1 and 2TB drives, you are going to need a lot of them to create a decent size storage and with redundancy. My first NAS used six 2TB WD Reds in a RAIDZ2 setup. They did what I needed at the time.

If you are not using these as a Log VDEV, then these are no different than a spinning rust drive with respect to failure problems. If a drive fails, regardless of why it failed, it still failed. If they are free, why not use them and if this is a test system to just see if you like the idea of all SSD, it will get your feet wet. Hey, I’m not an IT person, just a simple guy and I try to see things correctly, but I have been wrong before, I will be wrong again, but I personally would take a shot at it, again, free is good. If the data is important, run a RAIDZ3, or 3-way mirrors.

If you need a Log VDEV, use an appropriate drive.

Cheers

4

If I remember correctly, these posts were related to two problematic drives:

  1. The 990 Pro had issues with an early firmware. Affected drives would eat through their endurance quickly and switch to read only mode. Any drive with a recent firmware shouldn’t be affected by this any more.
  2. The 870 QVO SATA drives were popular for all flash arrays on a budget but the poor endurance of QLC NAND makes them unsuitable for write heavy workloads.

Apart from that I don’t remember issues which would be relevant in the context of NAS usage.

2 Likes
5

I need to use them to temporarily copy the data.

6

Yes, probably.

7

Trying to update firmware but i see error:

unable to execute ./fumagician: Permission denied

My motherboard is UEFI and cannot use the ISO from Samsung.

EDIT: Used Linux Bootable USB to do the firmware upgrade.