Hi, I have 4x 2TB Samsung EVO SATA SSD for my cache pool in a ZFS setup.  (total avaible space 5.7tb)    I have an extra Intel Optane P900 400gb and another Intel Optane P1600X 56gb.    Does adding one or both drives in a ZFS subpool make sense?  Based on great feedback from a previous ZFS question, they might benefit either as a metadata or cache drive.

 

Also, do the subpool drives increase longitivy on the main ZFS drives? If it only provides minimal improvement or saves SSD longevity over regular NVME drives, I'd rather save them for something that can take advantage of the Optane technology.

 

I hope this all makes.  🙂 Any suggestions would be great.  Thanks!

 

David

Edited February 14, 20251 yr by davidst95
update

A special vdev could improve performance for metadata, but since the main pool is already SSDs, doubt that you would notice much difference, unless your use case is super metadata intensive.

 

Using the larger one as an L2ARC could help with reads, if you read the same data multiple times, again it will depend on the use case.

 

The latter you can test and remove if it's not worth it, the former no, assuming the pool is raidz, you could still remove if they are striped mirrors.

On 2/15/2025 at 2:50 AM, JorgeB said:

A special vdev could improve performance for metadata, but since the main pool is already SSDs, doubt that you would notice much difference, unless your use case is super metadata intensive.

 

Using the larger one as an L2ARC could help with reads, if you read the same data multiple times, again it will depend on the use case.

 

The latter you can test and remove if it's not worth it, the former no, assuming the pool is raidz, you could still remove if they are striped mirrors.

 

Hi, sorry for the delay, and thanks for the info about the sub-pools.   I'm not going to worry about them now until I read up more about them.