February 16, 20242 yr I recently repurposed an old(ish) desktop into an Unraid server. It's old enough that the motherboard doesn't have any M.2 slots, but instead has 4 4TB SSDs. I've seen in the documentation that SSDs are great for cache / pool, but I haven't seen any recommendations pertaining to SSDs in the parity / main array slots, and in fact I've seen some Reddit posts suggesting this would actually lead to performance degradation. There unfortunately isn't any space in the 4U chassis I'm using for HDDs. For the trial period I used what was basically a "dummy" USB drive as the lone main array drive, and configured any apps I installed to use the "cache" of 4 SSDs instead. I did set up the SSD cache to use ZFS, as it seems like that provides some safety in the case of drive failures (in lieu of a parity drive / main array). I guess my question is: is this configuration viable for long-term use? Or should I be trying something else?
February 16, 20242 yr Community Expert Solution 26 minutes ago, magsol said: I guess my question is: is this configuration viable for long-term use? Or should I be trying something else? Perfectly viable, my two mains server have only pools, and in the near future you should be able to remove the dummy flash drive, since that requirement is expected to be removed soon.
July 2, 20242 yr On 2/16/2024 at 9:36 AM, JorgeB said: Perfectly viable, my two mains server have only pools, and in the near future you should be able to remove the dummy flash drive, since that requirement is expected to be removed soon. Hey JorgeB - thanks again for being super helpful. I'm jumping on the version 7 betaa and currently moving my data around to fully reformat my Unraid setup. I working with 4 x NVME and 2 x SSD, but previously had an array of 4, which I'm now learning should probably have been a pool. Can I get your recommendations? 2 x 2tb NVME - a pool called cache mostly for appdata and transfers, mirrored for redundancy. ZFS here? or would something else be faster 4 x 4tb (2 NVME and 2 SSD) - For general purpose storage, I was thinking ZFS here, with 1 parity (or whatever that's called in a zfs pool. I'm still learning here, so if you've got a better setup to recommend I'm eager to hear it!
July 2, 20242 yr Community Expert 3 hours ago, ldunklee said: or would something else be faster btrfs can be a little faster, in part depending on the hardware and available RAM, but zfs is better at recovering from a dropped device for example, so I recommend that. 3 hours ago, ldunklee said: I was thinking ZFS here, with 1 parity (or whatever that's called in a zfs pool. I would use a zfs raidz1 pool
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