Suggestions on Drive Configuration/Data Sets

TrueNAS General
1

I am still messing with drive configuration a storage methods. I have been trying to read what I can.

1X Small NVME Drive for TrueNAS install

4X Drive RAIDZ1 = Working Directory for active files in/out of the NAS
6X Drive RAIDZ2 = Archive Drive for the RAIDZ1 and other computers - aside from back-ups/archive nothing will be using this actively.
1X SSD that I don’t know what to do with, should I have pointed my Docker Apps to this drive? Would it even be a performance thing? Or could this be a cache or temp item?

2

We are really just guessing without full hardware specs. No, probably don’t need L2ARC. Yes, Apps normally get put on a Mirror VDEV of SSD / NVMe

3

I see people add system specs on the bottom of their posts. Is that a signature? Or someother way to do it?

4

It’s a signature. Yours can be edited (only by you of course) at https://forums.truenas.com/u/theedudenator/preferences/profile

5

Thanks for the signature!

So I guess my question is there any reason/use for the SSD drive I have. Something I should have the apps/docker items running on? Or there won’t be a performance issue anyway?

6

I run my apps on an SSD volume of 2 mirrored SATA SSDs. I probably wouldn’t run them on a single SSD, because I want to have some level of data integrity for my apps.

If you must use that SSD, you could set up an L2ARC cache. IIRC it doesn’t matter for data integrity, if you lose that drive. But there may not be much of a benefit and it may wear out that drive pretty quickly, especially if it’s a consumer level drive. FWIW I don’t use an L2ARC, but I have 128GB of RAM in my server so my ARC is plenty big. With your 32 GB of RAM, it might be of more interest, but please note that L2ARC also takes up some extra RAM, so size it carefully.

In any case, just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

7

So now I have all my apps on the SSD drive.
If the app creates a lot of data that is on my ZFS drive.

So now I think I should back-up my Apps on SSD to my “Archive” dataset.
Maybe every week or so.
I am still trying to read and figure out how all this back-up stuff works.

8

You probably should make clear what your question is.