Hi TruNas guys, What speed can I expect with 4 x nvme disks and a 10Gb network card? I am working on a new installation with pools for iSCSI and 2 x SMB shares. What is the best disk hardware for a new installation? Since it should be quiet, are NVME disks an option or SSD disks (SATA6Gb)? In a test with SAS & SSD disks, the SAS disks were faster. So I’m wondering 4 NVME disks raidz1 or 4 SATA SSD disks. Will the NVME disks with a 10Gb connection really be faster than the SATA SSDs?
Or would a combination of 2 x 4TB NVME mirrors for iSCSI (VMware vmfs) and 4 SATA SSD disks for fileshare be better? The environment is not business productive. Truena’s server will run on a workstation motherboard.(AMD or Intel)
With which hardware have you had good performance experiences?
Best regards
Novell1
Nope. Not really for the network activity. If you are running VMs on TrueNAS, then the faster NVMe drives may be worth the investment. Also, to get the max speed out of NVMe, you need to have 4 PCIe lanes for each NVMe drive. That is a lot of lanes and not many motherboards can do that. Do some research on this stuff, that is the only way you will be satisfied.
SSD’s are considerably less expensive and available in larger capacities. Keep that in mind.
I can’t speak to iSCSI, no personal experience.
There is a lot of good hardware out there, and a lot of bad hardware for a server purpose. Look at peoples signatures, see what they have. If you are using an older workstation, before buying drives, run some stress tests on it, make sure the darn thing works. If you are buying new, prepare to spend some money.
Speaking of money, Don’t be cheap on the main components (MB, RAM, HBA, NIC, PS, good airflow case) as these are the parts you want to stick around for a long time. Drives are consumable, they are expected to wear out. Some last a very long time, some not so long.
Redundancy is very important depending on your use case. You said RAIDZ1 which is fine if you are maintaining a backup of important information. RAIDZ2 or Mirror (for iSCSI) is something I would prefer a bit more.
Read the User Guide (yes it is big) but one thing you should know is “How to replace a failing drive”. If you have been here for a while you have seen so many posts asking for help in this area. It is best to figure it out before you need to do it.
dinner time and I’m hungry.