Threadripper Pro VM workstation build questions - mainly storage related

Depends entirely on your workload, as a SLOG is only beneficial when doing lots of sync writes. Asyncronous writes don’t use the SLOG/ZIL at all. Those Samsung 980 Pro aren’t really made for the SLOG-job, too much wear and no power-loss protection. You only need like 16GB of SLOG for default configurations, so people tend to overprovision their SLOG to the max or use special drives.

Storage nowadays has trouble keeping up with NVMe speeds and ZFS isn’t that different. You may be disappointed when comparing manufacturer numbers with your own numbers. But the raid0 or raid 10 in zfs-equivalents are the two fastest options. Or use md raid 0 for two SSDs, losing all ZFS features for performance and do regular backups to your ZFS pool. I suggest to test run both configurations and decide afterwards.

For HDDs…whatever floats your boat. People like RaidZ because you end up with more usable storage. But if you want to copy/backup those 2TB images to your platters…striped mirror aka Raid10 might save you lots of time at the cost of capacity. Parity raid configurations aren’t known for their write speeds, quite the contrary.

I’m testing consumer NVMes in a special vdev configuration on top of my HDD zpool right now, but you can check on Wendells tuning tips here: ZFS Metadata Special Device: Z

Oh and don’t put non-redundant drives into the same pool as drives with redundancy (RaidZ,1,10). One vDev dead = Pool dead = Game over, man.

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