I got myself some evos during amazon sales period.How should i use 6 x 500 gb evos. I have a few options and i need some advice. my currrent pcs dont need extra storage nor speed (nvme ftw). I am rebuilding my pc ecosystem and dont want to waste them. I would like to utilise them to the maximum. here is the list of of options
A) zfs and virtual machine pool ( im torn between using raid z2 of 6x evos and using p3600 and ram disks for the other write intensive stuff , I have a ton of ecc ram , 200 gb ecc ddr4 ram between my freenas and vm workstation, )
b) Vm backup along with my Freenas box for fast
c)Naigos /wiresharg box plus other linux services with zfs ( im a noob to this! but I have some free time i would like to invest in learning things)
d) adding it as an extra fast storage to freenasnas box ( multiple 10 gig nics on the network)
e) total waste, using them for games library, emulators etc.Os drives are not needed, enterprise grade drives for that, booting times on server grade mobos is horrible anyway 5 s wont change a thing. I do not want to resell them , I wont get the money I invested in them sadly.
edit, yes I do have a 4k monitor
"dont need extra storage nor speed (nvme ftw)." - I question your purchase as to why beyond the standard "Because they were on sale and because I could" of them drives ;p
Using them as reliable backup or zfs and vm pool is what I would go for
I would add it to an existing NAS as fast shared storage. You could allocate storage out to any box as needed for any purpose. VMs, database, search indexing, etc. It might be too slow to do too much in raidz2 through. Possibly going with a raid10 equivalent in ZFS would be better.
I am not sure how reliable they are,so i said raid z2.I a bit sceptic about evo series ( I own 2x 840 evo and i Know that they are a bastard child of samsung that no sane person would love ).Using them in a proper way is mystery for me. Freenas forums are focused on platter devices and 1gigabit ethernet .Every idea of using ssd for for anything else than caches ( hehe zil is not a cache!) is wrong or using non enterprise grade ssds is a blasphemy unless you decide to buy their prebuilt stuff. things might have changed but i wasnt lurking there for a long while
I am trying to move away from platter. I have a ton of slow storage for non vital things like movies.I have seen them on sale so I got a bunch of them ,then nvm happened and high endurance non slc drives started to .Yeah i got them when they were cheap.Some people say that they a good drives, but i have decided to give samsung last chance . and my situation is difficult to explain, I earn some money and I need to spend it : ) I am single and the more money i spend means that people i dont like will get less in the end. I dont want to explain that situation :)
I have 4x Samsung 850s in ZFS RAID-Z1 for my homelab storage. Works well, the higher IOPS really help even with just gigabit links.
good to know.might go for raid z1.I want to move my windows WS to Vm teritorry and i am concerned about reliability of evos, hehehe amazons reviews state that trion ssd are great etc. Its difficult to get a reliable data on the subject, thanks!
With raid z2 i think you're SSD's will be bottlenecked, i would do miror's, in a raid 10 like setup, you will lose some capacity, and i would prefer raid z2's redundancy, but your CPU wouldn't be taxed as hard, and you should gain a lot of performance as you get 6 850s to Read from simultaneously, plus you could expand by adding 2X500GB SSD's at a time.
If you have similar Vm's, and a lot of spare RAM, the data deduplication feature in FreeNAS, starts to make sense, you would need at least 32GB ECC RAM just for your 6 evo's though.
So a FreeNAS ZFS box setup like a SAN, with a 10 gig nic and raid z miror's would be my choice, just and idea but i'm no expert, about to setup my first FreeNAS box.
Thanks for the advice, I am doing it 1st time myself. The I got all the parts when the prices were reasonable and now need to finish and rebuild my other pcs ( custom made waterblock decided to crack on a test bed , luckily I was using only distilled water;/) . I didnt think about configs other than raid z. Will try both raid -z1 and your config to check the differences before deploying permanent setup.
are you dead set stuck on using ZFS or can free nas not use BTRFS? if im not mistaken the video @wendell put out that covered zfs and btrfs had btrfs as a better solution than zfs raid configuration for speed and expand ability. (been a while since i last watched that video) maybe we get lucky and he will throw his 2cents into this.
Hi, sorry for late reply.I wasnt able to reset my acc password. My freenas box would use zfs so it an option if i put it in nas box.I dont need to expand the number of drives.
Not sata drives at least.When I bought them I thought it would be a good idea to use it in virtual machine workstation with hypervisor supporting zfs. If it isnt a good idea I can always swap around few drives and use single 800gig p3600 for my vms and use evos as jbod for gaming pc ;/
ok yeah if you dont need to expand then zfs will be your best bet.