Recommended drive setup, spinners, ssd, and fusion - ohh my

TrueNAS General
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TLDR: mix of drives, need help setting up recommended ZFS pools, vdev etc.

Hey everyone,

I am just about to deploy another homelab that has been sitting around for a while and figured i’ll spin up TrueNAS Scale on this one.

My experience with truenas is limited to core and standard issue spinner zfs setups (z1/2 etc). I mainly use Unraid (should I be saying that here :smile: )

With this server, its main usage will be for fast local network storage, s3/cloud object storage, dockers, VM and whatnot.

Specs as follows (r730xd)

  • 256MB DDR4 Ram
  • 1x 1.2TB Fusion IO PCI drive (not sure if compatible yet)
  • 2x 1.92TB samsung SAS drives
  • 2x 900gb DELL SATA drives
  • 10x 900gb SAS 10k spinners

What would be the recommended setup with this mix as my ZFS experience is limited

Thanks in advance

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Correction: 256GB DDR4 Ram

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Are these mechanical drives too?

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How did I miss that, they are SATA enterprise SSD

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These links may help

BASICS

iX Systems pool layout whitepaper

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You can really only make them into pools in groups of matching devices:

  • 10x900GB SAS HDDs in a 10x RAIDZ2 or 9x RAIDZ2 + a hot spare
  • 2x900GB SATA SSDs in a mirror
  • 2x 1.92 TB SAS HDDs as a mirror

There are mixed search results for the Fusion IO board - some pages say it works, some says that the drive doesn’t appear.

If you can make it work then to use as a special allocation vDev you would need more of these cards to mirror them, so I guess you could potentially use it for L2ARC though I doubt it will do much.

The 2x SSD drives could be used for the boot pool, but this would seem to be a bit of a waste of 850GB of each of them. So personally I would buy 1x or 2x cheap small good quality SATA SSD (or NVMe if the MB supports them) to use as a boot drive and use the 2x 950GB SATA SSDs as a mirrored apps pool.

I would like to have fewer pools, but there is no realistic way to combine them into a smaller number of pools.

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900gb SSDs as boot pool mirror unless you have another boot drive.

Fusion Drive drive as SLOG perhaps if it is suitable.

As mentioned you could consider special vdevs for the SSDs, but regular advise is for double redundancy on a raidz2, but I’m not sure if that’s necessary. Afterall, enterprise SSDs are less failure prone than HDs (I believe)

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Thanks @Stux, @Protopia and @SmallBarky. I’ll take you’re feedback given and do some options and testing.

I think I will do just that and pick up 2x smaller SSD drives since I have 2 more slots left anyway and use them as a boot drive. I may also repurpose the other drives into my other server if it doesnt make sense to utilise to increase i/o and performance.

Thanks all and i’ll do some testing

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Even if that is true, ZFS disks tend to wear equally across a pool (by design). The point about RAIDZ2 is that after one drive fails, the resilver creates stress on the remaining drives, and the likelihood of a 2nd failure is high during this process. That said these are small drives despite the width. On my own 5x 4TB drives I opted for RAIDZ1, but after I populated the system I had 2nd thoughts and wished I had adopted RAIDZ2 instead but it was too late. So I purchased a one-time 500GB online storage in order to back-up my critical data as a 2nd line of defense.

Summary: If it were me I would use this point about enterprise reliability to forget a hot spare and do 10x RAIDZ2.