FreeNAS All SSDs?

I’m looking at building an “SSD NAS” for a small 10GbE network. It will be used for photo and video projects, so really just need snappy sequential read/write.

Normally, I’d go with FreeNAS for something like this, but I’ve never tackled an all SSD ZFS situation before.

I found this thread on the FreeNAS forum saying that there are a lot of caveats, and it’s generally a bad idea, but that’s from 6 years ago.

Anyone have any experience with this? I’m looking to use 860 Evos… might be able to push the budget to 860 Pros, but nothing enterprise level.

Normally, I’d go with normal hard drives in striped mirrors and a ton of RAM, but with RAM prices being what they are, idk. Also, noise and physical space are limitations here.

Another reason I’m leaning towards SSDs is that I don’t need much capacity. This is just for active projects, so a few terabytes of space plus 50% overhead will be all I need.

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I used 8 ADATA SSD’s worked great (RAIDZ2). Got full throughput of SATAIII on windows samba. On a R710 with 2x X5675 xeons. Ate upwards of 200W at idle though, so I had to stop using it.

I wouldn’t recommend it because of the noise and power draw. Also I sunk like $700 into the thing. I think a synology nas would be better serve me.

But yeah if you have a modern-ish system that is decent on power draw then SSD’s would do you great.

https://www.amazon.com/ADATA-SU800-128GB-3D-NAND-ASU800SS-128GT-C/dp/B01K8A29BE/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1521308183&sr=8-3&keywords=adata%2BSSD&th=1

I rescind my recommendation for these SSD’s as I have had 3 die on me recently.

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Thanks!

Yeah, it seems reasonable to expect that a lot of the consumer SSD growing pains have been addressed since 2012…

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Wanna buy 8 SSD’s (barely used) :smile:

But in all seriousness, it was a fun project.

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That reminds me. There was a thread several months ago about someone on r/homelab who did this.

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I have a dedup’d zpool of 4 ssds

But I run it on ZOL, not freenas.

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What’s you memory to storage ratio?

@oO.o

Total storage in both pools is 13TB.
Have 64G of ram, max arc is set at 36G

I have more storage… but my case isnt large enough to hold it all

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Why did you dedup by chance?

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I use the ssd zpool for centos/rhel OS LUNS to run on my proxmox server using targetd over fibre channel.

Small amount of space goes a long way when you keep alot of the same things in the dedup’d pool.

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2 mirrors?

What’s SSDs are you using?

yes

2x Team Group L5 LITE 3D
2x Mushkin Enhanced ECO3

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My understanding is that ZFS doesn’t support TRIM. Is that accurate?

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Cool.

Don’t mean to interrogate, but what OS are you running ZOL on? And what’s your fiber setup? Don’t see that too often anymore.

This was definitely an issue, but I think it might have been added recently? I’ll deep dive tomorrow to see if I can find out if/when it was implemented. I have a vague memory from a BSD talk on youtube or maybe an Allan Jude video.

Yeah. :confused: So many hours of content with that man.

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Quick Google says FreeBSD has it but ZOL does not:

http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Features#TRIM_Support

Not sure how frequently the OpenZFS wiki is updated, but at least for FreeNAS, TRIM support should be good.

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Ah, that would be where the issue was. I had remembered ZFS being problematic. I’ve been wanting to run an all-SSD ZFS root for a while, but that’s not an option for me at this point because of trim.

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I found it. It looks like it’s close to merge in ZOL.

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got me thinking about ordering some a plethora of ssd

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Damn good.

I’ve been slowly ordering SSD over the last few months. I’ve got 3x500GB disks in my system right now with the intent of purchasing 3 more to give me a RAID6 setup. Using BTRFS at the moment and I’m thinking that unless rebalancing features land in ZFS, I’m going to be sticking with it.