I’ve posted a few days ago, asking how to setup my storage for Proxmox on my Lenovo M90q, which I since then settled. Or so I thought. The Lenovo has space for two NVME and one SATA SSD.
There seems to a general consensus, that you shouldn’t use consumer SSDs (even NAS SSDs like WD Red) for ZFS, since there will be lots of writes which in turn will wear out the SSD fast.
Some conflicting information is out there with some saying it’s fine and a few GB writes per day is okay and others warning of several TBs writes per day.
I plan on using Proxmox as a hypervisor for homelab use with one or two VMs runnning Docker, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Arr-Stack, TubeArchivist, PiHole and such. All static data (files, videos, music) will not be stored on ZFS, just the VM images themselves.
I did some research and found a few SSDs with good write endurance (see table below) and settled on two WD Red SN700 2TB in a ZFS Mirror. Those drives have 2500TBW. For file storage, I’ll just use a Samsung 870EVO with 4TB and 2400TBW.
| SSD | TB | TBW | € |
|---|---|---|---|
| 980 PRO | 1TB | 600 | 68 |
| 2TB | 1200 | 128 | |
| SN 700 | 500GB | 1000 | 48 |
| 1TB | 2000 | 70 | |
| 2TB | 2500 | 141 | |
| 870 EVO | 2TB | 1200 | 117 |
| 4TB | 2400 | 216 | |
| SA 500 | 2TB | 1300 | 137 |
| 4TB | 2500 | 325 |
Is that good enough? Would you rather recommend enterprise grade SSDs? And if so, which ones would you recommend, that are m.2 NVME? Or should I just stick with ext4 as a file system, loosing data security and the ability for snapshots?
I’d love to hear your thought’s about this, thanks!
The main problem with self-healing is that ZFS needs to have access to two copies of data, usually solved by having 2+ disks. When you expose an mdadm device ZFS will only perceive one disk and one copy of data, so it won’t try to store 2 copies of data anywhere. Underneath, mdadm will be storing the two copies of data, so any healing would need to be handled by mdadm directly instead. ZFS normally auto-heals when it reads data and when it scrubs, but in this setup mdadm would need to start the healing process through whatever measures it has (probably just scrubbing?)
Today, growing a pool is possible by adding a vdev, right?
So, instead of RAIDZ2, one could setup their pool with mirrored vdevs.
However, I’m not sure about the self-healing part. Would it still work with mirrored vdevs, especially when my vdevs consist of two physical drives only?
FYI: RAIDZ expansion just got merged: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15022
Estimated timeline is about a year from now for OpenZFS 2.3 which will include it.
Mirrored vdevs allow growth by adding a pair at a time, yes. Healing works with mirrors, because each of the two disks in a mirror are supposed to have the same data as each other. When a read or scrub happens, if there’s any checksum failures it will replace the failed block on Disk1 with Disk2’s copy of that block.
Many ZFS’ers swear by mirrored vdevs because they give you the best performance, they’re more flexible, and resilvering from a failed mirror disk is an order of magnitude faster than resilvering from a failed RAIDZ - leaving less time for a second disk failure. The big downside is that they eat 50% of your disk capacity. I personally run mirrored vdevs because it’s more flexible for a small home NAS, and I make up for some of the disk inefficiency by being able to buy any-size disks on sale and throw them in whenever I see a good price.