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!

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

    I barely scratched the surface with ZFS, so I’m not going to touch another file system for a while now. I’m fine with detecting data corruption only, since those files (on the static data storage) can be replaced easily and hold no real value for me. All other data will be either on the redundant pool or is saved to several other media and even one off-site copy.

    I already wrote down ashift=12 in my notes for when I set it up.

    In general, I found there is a lot of FUD out there when it comes to data security. One I liked a lot was ECC RAM being mandatory for ZFS. Then one of the creators of it basically said: "Nah, it’s not needed more than for any other file system’.

    • Yote.zipEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Yeah ECC RAM is great in general but there’s nothing about ZFS that likes ECC more than any other thing you do on your computer. You are not totally safe from bit flips unless every machine in the transaction has ECC RAM. Your workstation could flip a bit on a file as it’s sending it to your ZFS pool, and your ECC’d ZFS pool will hold that bit flip as gospel.