Heh, I got busy and hadn’t been back on. Glad to see the conversation continued.
Your logic is sound on the TBW and cost being only a minuscule amount more for the 500GB. Since it’s your boot pool it shouldn’t have an insane amount of writes I wouldn’t think but it’s worth it. I’d be more tempted to use the nvme slots for a separate zfs mirror pool or write cache. I’d hate to waste the speed you get with NVMe on a boot pool. I go super budget on my homelab stuff but I still try to be pretty safe to not lose any data.
I know diizzy mentioned the Sandisk Plus drives being slow but it was something I already had on the shelf that I trusted and being the boot pool it pretty much doesn’t matter from what I can tell. WD drives are probably good as well but I don’t have any direct data and experience with them to reference.
In the past few days, I had quite some time to think it through and read some posts (and the same ones again and again ). I think I will go with the Samsung 870 EVO.
My biggest fear was that the constant I/O would wear down the SSD if I move the system dataset to the SSD (I have it there currently as well, because this way everything is nice and quiet), but I saw some posts saying that even that should not be a problem with the 870 EVO, so I really hope that will be the case.
So all in all, I think I will just go with a mirrored pool of 2 500GB 870 EVOs. (The 500GB variant costs essentially the same as the 250GB one with twice the TBW, so that seems like a no-brainer)
). I think I will go with the Samsung 870 EVO.