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!

  • @NAKEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    I’ll agree with the other commenter here.

    Also there may not be any difference between the consumer and enterprise drives. The reason the enterprise cost more is the better warranty. But because they have different components.

    Monitor the drives, modern drives are pretty good at predicting when they are dying, and replace it necessary.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Yeah, concering TBW there wasn’t a huge difference between cosumer- and enterprise drives that I saw. Something along 2500TBW vs. 3500TBW (unless you go with those unaffordable drives, then yes). I’ll monitor the drives and if I find rapidly increasing wear, I can still switch to another file system. The whole reason I bought the Lenovo is to setup a second machine and experiment, while I still have a running “production” system. Thank you!