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

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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