Should I use WD blue for running TrueNAS

TrueNAS General
1

Hello! I was wondering that can I use the WD Blue for running TrueNAS OS only since I am planning to repurpose an old PC to a NAS using two WD Red 4TB HDDs for this rig. Is something like a WD Blue 250GB SSD a suitable OS drive for TrueNAS?

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Yes.

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Basically any SSD that is a minimum of 16GB (as per iX), I would suggest go for at least a 120GB is fine for a boot drive. I would suggest you get two drives have them in a mirror though.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t seen any major differences in speed from gen3 speed to gen4 speed SSDs (in personal playing around) for a boot other than a slightly faster initial startup.

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Actually, I would suggest against mirroring the boot drive: just keeping a config backup as well as a spare drive is enough; if you need HA, please read Highly Available Boot Pool Strategy | TrueNAS Community.

You want at least 120 GB drives (altough nowadays it’s likely easier to find 250 GB ones) mainly because SCALE constantly writes to the boot pool, and higher capacity drives have better endurance.

2 Likes
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that is an interesting read, I did have it in the past where I did have a drive fail in the boot pool, and it carried on running and restarted okay before I replaced it; so maybe I just got lucky with it as it hadn’t partially failed

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ZFS can kick out your drives if they don’t behave, and might allow them back if they do: ZFS gives, ZFS takes.

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uh no…i have had more than a couple boot failures in truenas systems both whitebox and from ix leading to downtime…most assuredly mirror the boot pool…when one drive fails the system will remain up while you can schedule a maintenance windows to address the situation.

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blue hdd no…if you want hdd use ironwolf or ironwolf pro or an actual rated NAS or enterprise drive. IF it’s an ssd those blue one are read focused so do not use them in a high write environment.

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That’s a pretty big assumption you are making. Plainly: there is a proper way of doing things if you require HA, otherwise it’s just generally not worth mirroring the boot pool. It’s not harmful eiher btw.

It’s an SSD.