I have an old Nas i built that i wanted to update.
It was running a C2550D4I with 16gb ram in a Silverstone DS380B.
It had three 6tb wd hard drives in a zfs array.
I was wondering if it was possible to replace the hard drives with ssds, or will running ssds in a zfs array be a bad idea, im not sure how long term use in a zfs array would effect ssds?
can you guys give me any advice in regards to this, its all in the planning stages and ive been out of the loop for a few years in regards.
Simply replacing isn’t possible because you probably won’t get 6TB SSDs or larger, otherwise zpool replace will work as intended.
But you can create a second pool with the SSDs and copy the data over to the SSDs, no problem.
SSDs work fine in ZFS. Depends on what you want to achieve with it. Lower noise/power? Well SSDs certainly have the advantage on their side.
For performance, proper caching usually don’t justifty the high price per TB for SSDs. And you’re still limited by networking.
Be aware that there are quite a fair bit of lemons regarding SSDs just as with HDDs and as Exard3k said you might want to consider why you’re moving to SSDs.
I’d say pick up some bigger, faster more modern HDD’s and enjoy it. Unless this thing’s in your bedroom or something lol but I’d imagine you’d be hard-pressed to snag 18+ TB of SSD’s and it feel reasonable.
I built my new main NAS with 64GB RAM, 6 x 4TB SAS Disks in mirrors, 2 x 800GB SSD’s for metadata (Sized 800GB just because I already had the SSD’s) and a 1TB NVMe drive for L2ARC. Its lightning fast, you really can’t tell its disk
Read and writes are almost always 1GB/s unless I’m doing a very large write and then it dips down
So the reason I was thinking of using ssd’s is that I don’t really trust hard drives anymore, it seems I am always running into the issue of them dying or doing something that gives me cause for concern
No one does. Never trust any drive That’s we like having RAID with redundancy and ZFS to ensure data integrity.
The big benefit of HDD is price per TB which is only 1/5th to 1/10th of a TB you pay on an SSD. It’s still cheaper per TB of pool capacity even if you lose multiple drives.
I do see the point in <10TB NAS capacity scenarios because HDDs aren’t that competitive there.
I myself got spare drives I use for backup and that act as replacement if some drive dies, so everything is back to normal within 3min. Even with these drives I’m way cheaper than with an SSD pool.
But as I said above: If you can move the old pool to your new SSD pool, it will run like a charm. ZFS starts to bog down with >10GB/s when using NVMe drives, but you won’t get anywhere near that with SATA SSDs.
If you are going with e.g. 3x 8TB SATA SSDs, you can just use replace on all three disks and don’t mess with anything else. ZFS doesn’t care what drive you have, it only cares about the capacity being equal or higher than the RAIDZ drive you are replacing.
That’s we like having RAID with redundancy and ZFS to ensure data integrity.