I saw the caveat that using ssds for storage is experimental and may not work as expected. Can someone explain what might go wrong?

 

My plan is to essentially build an itx machine with rocket 4 plus 8tb nvme drives (potentially up to 6 eventually) for storage. But, this could be a massive money pit if my plan has a fatal flaw. Is this going to work?

It probably depends on what you want to do with your system.

A critical element being whether you want to host dockers or VMs.

In my system I have 4 x HD and 1 x NVME SSD.   Initially all the docker

containers and VMs were on SSD.

 

However one of the VM's (an Ubuntu server instance) was totally clobbering the

SSD with about 2 GB/s write rate.  After one week it had consumed about 10% of the

SSD rated lifetime.  There was a lengthy thread about Docker containers having write

amplification problems, and eventually a fix seemed to come about.   But my server

VM did not appear to benefit.   So I moved all the always-on VMs over to Hard Drive.

The write rate there is  *****WAY***** lower than to SSD for some reason.

 

-- Tom

 

 

1 hour ago, Jlarimore said:

Can someone explain what might go wrong?

It should all work fine except there won't be trim support for any SSDs assigned as array devices, so performance might degrade with time, thou it will also depend on the devices used.

What Tom describes is my biggest fear. These drives have the write speed capabilities to essentially self destruct if something decides to constantly write to them. I guess as long as there is a way to keep a close eye that that isn't happening I will be a little less worried.

Playing with several Ubuntu VM's - found that logging out the local user (while leaving the VM up and services running) cuts down the write rate dramatically.

 

-- Tom