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!

  • Pete90@feddit.deOPEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    Thank you so much for this explanation. I am just a beginner, so those horror stories did scare me a bit. I also read, that you can fine tune ZFS to prevent write amplification so I’ll read into that subject a bit more.

    I thought ZFS without redundancy did give no benefits, but I most have gotten that wrong. Thanks again!

    • Yote.zip@pawb.socialEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      ZFS without redundancy is not great in the sense that redundancy is ideal in all scenarios, but it’s still a modern filesystem with a lot of good features, just like BTRFS. The main problem will be that it can detect data corruption but not heal it automatically. Transparent compression, snapshotting, data checksums, copy-on-write (power loss resiliency), and reflinking are modern features of both ZFS/BTRFS, and BTRFS additionally offers offline-deduplication, meaning you can deduplicate any data block that exists twice in your pool without incurring the massive resources that ZFS deduplication requires. ZFS is the more mature of the two, and I would use that if you’ve already got ZFS tooling set up on your machine.

      Note that the TrueNAS forums spread a lot of FUD about ZFS, but ZFS without redundancy is ok. I would take anything alarmist from there with a grain of salt. BTRFS and ZFS both store 2 copies of all metadata by default, so bitrot will be auto-healed on a filesystem level when it’s read or scrubbed.

      Edit: As for write amplification, just use ashift=12 and don’t worry too much about it.