I’ve posted a few days ago, asking how to setup my storage for Proxmox on my Lenovo M90q, which I since then settled. Or so I thought. The Lenovo has space for two NVME and one SATA SSD.

There seems to a general consensus, that you shouldn’t use consumer SSDs (even NAS SSDs like WD Red) for ZFS, since there will be lots of writes which in turn will wear out the SSD fast.

Some conflicting information is out there with some saying it’s fine and a few GB writes per day is okay and others warning of several TBs writes per day.

I plan on using Proxmox as a hypervisor for homelab use with one or two VMs runnning Docker, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Arr-Stack, TubeArchivist, PiHole and such. All static data (files, videos, music) will not be stored on ZFS, just the VM images themselves.

I did some research and found a few SSDs with good write endurance (see table below) and settled on two WD Red SN700 2TB in a ZFS Mirror. Those drives have 2500TBW. For file storage, I’ll just use a Samsung 870EVO with 4TB and 2400TBW.

SSD TB TBW €
980 PRO 1TB 600 68
2TB 1200 128
SN 700 500GB 1000 48
1TB 2000 70
2TB 2500 141
870 EVO 2TB 1200 117
4TB 2400 216
SA 500 2TB 1300 137
4TB 2500 325

Is that good enough? Would you rather recommend enterprise grade SSDs? And if so, which ones would you recommend, that are m.2 NVME? Or should I just stick with ext4 as a file system, loosing data security and the ability for snapshots?

I’d love to hear your thought’s about this, thanks!

  • AnonStoleMyPantsEnglish
    7•1 year ago

    Don’t sweat it.

    I remember looking into this as well like a year ago. I also found the same info and started to look into ssds, consumer and enterprise grade and after all that I realised that most of it is just useless fuzzing about. Yes it is an interesting rabbit hole in which I spent a week probably. In the end one simple thing nullifies most of this: you can track writes per day and SSD health. It is not like you need to somehow made a guess when the drives fail. You do not. Keep track of the health and writes per day and you will get a good sense of how your system behaves. Run that for 6 months and you are infinitely wiser when it comes to this stuff.

    • @Pete90@feddit.deOPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      That rabbit hole is interesting, but also deep and scary. I’m trying to challenge myself by setting up Proxmox, as so far I’ve just used Raspbery Pis as well as OpenMediaVault. So when I saw those stories about drives dying after 6 months, I was a bit concerned;. Especially because I can’t yet verify the truth in those storries, since I’d call myself and advanced novice if I’, being generous.

      I’ll track drive usage and wear and see what my system does. Good point, then I can get rid of the guesswork. Thank you a lot!