NVME Drive Selection & Plan

TrueNAS General
1

I’m working on a new build for home use and trying to decide what drives and configuration to use for the faster storage pool. I’ll have capacity for up to 8 spinning disk but also 4 nvme drives.

For my nvme drives I’m thinking:
1.) Cheap 32G Optane for boot
2 & 3.) Maybe 2T 890 Evo Pro
4.) 1TB used optane

The 2TB evo drives would be mirrored for vm/docker data. These aren’t high utilization and I don’t expect a lot of writes here. My current docker data directory on my synology is like 30G and my vm is 40G so there should be plenty of free space for growth and room for write leveling. I know I won’t have PLDP but it seems like a decent cost savings to go without and could be mitigated by backups to the spinning pool.

The used 1T optane would be for a scratch disk for downloads and unzips. Thinking this would be good to keep from doing a lot of unnecessary writes to the docker/vm pool drives, keep from fragmenting that pool, and that even if it is a used drive, it’s remaining write life might still be higher than off the shelf consumer.

Is this a reasonable strategy or should I be considering something different or even other drives?

2

without knowing the workload it’s hard to tell, I would suspect the1tb optane plus 32gb optane for boot is likely overkill.

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3

Workload is largely idle home use - workstation backups, plex, arr suite, mostly idle linux vm, maybe the occasional other container like a unifi controller or something like that.

What would be overkill about the combination of the 2 optane drives? I understood the general recommendation was boot is boot only?

4

The Optane scratch drive might be overkill.
Optane M10 as small and cheap boot device is totally fine.

5

Ah, just let it download straight to the evo’s given home use?

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