SSD recommendation for storage pool

Dave Hob

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I looked over the hardware guide and seams like SSD are ok to be used but didn't specify anything else other than getting the best quality the budget allows.

Are some recommended SSDs for Truenas?

Any downside in using SSD vs spinning drives for the nas storage?

Thank you
 

HoneyBadger

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Are some recommended SSDs for Truenas?

What's your target workload/use case for SSDs? A lightly-accessed or read-heavy share for a handful of users will have significantly different requirements from a busy block storage SAN for VMFS.

Any downside in using SSD vs spinning drives for the nas storage?

Besides "a significantly lighter wallet" - SSDs do eventually wear out from writes over time.
 

Dave Hob

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It's a home server mostly. Wouldn't say heavy workload.

Need it mostly for video production storage and since the files are big was thinking to improve on transfer speeds with SSD

How do they wear out compared with spinning drives? how's life expectancy compared with spinning drives?
 

HoneyBadger

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SSDs wear out based on writes, typically expressed as either TBW (terabytes written) or DWPD (drive writes per day) - so the more that you write to them, the faster they will burn out. The more writes a drive can handle, the more expensive it tends to be.

Spinning disks, on the other hand, die based on mechanical failure - you can write the daylights out of them, and they'll just happily carry on until their bearings seize or they receive some other "mechanical incentive to fail" - like a large object falling on your computer, or your computer itself being the large object doing the falling.

Video archival storage generally is just fine on HDDs, as it's "large sequential file access" for the archive reads and writes - if you're talking about doing work on the live files (NLE) I usually suggest doing your work on local storage (high-quality NVMe will give you several GB/s of throughput) and performing regular backup copies to cheap spinning disk (locally or in TrueNAS)

What size of files, and what kind of transfer speed are you usually seeing? I imagine a large array of spinning disks with a point-to-point 10GbE network and sufficient local SSD would be a better overall setup.
 

Dave Hob

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Got it so you are suggesting increase local nvme storage and keep spinning drives for freenas storage.

My pc/hackintosh is i9-10900k, Gigabyte Z490 vision d.

Server is a Dell T410 with 1gb networking card with 32GB ECC RAM

* side question how can I see what raidz setup did I chose for my pool, can't find that setting in freenas

This is the speed test that I am getting with CrystalDiskMark

disk speed test.PNG


If I was to update Pc Nic card to a spf+ + add a mikrotik with spf+ ports + add spf+ card in server (or even upgrade the server if I can figure out my issues with R730xd that is not deployed yet https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/r730xd-issues-questions.88033/ , what improvement on speeds do you expect I will see with this spinning drives. I'm using WD 3TB red x 6 and most likely raidz2

the R730xd journey been a frustrating one so far (though I learned a lot and that was part of the goal) so not sure if I should sell it and get a supermicro or what.
 

HoneyBadger

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side question how can I see what raidz setup did I chose for my pool, can't find that setting in freenas

Storage -> Pools -> Gear icon (top right) -> Status

Look at the level right under your pool, it should say (Poolname) -> RAIDZn

If this is the only workstation doing the editing (and the T410 is physically close enough) you could just do a point-to-point link using a pair of 10GbE cards (Intel X520 is okay, Chelsio T520 is better, I've heard some people have luck with Mellanox cards) and a short SFP-DAC copper cable. Saves you the cost of the switch and the optical SFP+ modules.

I would say with a six-drive assumed Z2 you'd at the very least be doubling your sequential read/write speeds, more likely getting around 300MB/s. It will depend on how full your pool is and how fragmented the free space is as well.
 

Dave Hob

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Storage -> Pools -> Gear icon (top right) -> Status

Look at the level right under your pool, it should say (Poolname) -> RAIDZn

that was easy

any idea if the Chelsio T520 is supported on mac? since I run most video production under the hackintosh boot?

thank you
 

HoneyBadger

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With it being a Hackintosh, I've read reports that the "Syba SD-PEX24055" uses the exact same chipset as the iMac Pro and has native support from 10.13 onwards with no kext hacking required.

You'd need to use a 10GbaseT card on the FreeNAS side (Intel X520-T series as opposed to cheaper X520-DA) though to do a direct-connect. I'd suggest a little searching around Hackintosh forums/subreddits, it's not my forte (not an Apple fan) so I won't try to speak authoritatively on it.
 

Dave Hob

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With it being a Hackintosh, I've read reports that the "Syba SD-PEX24055" uses the exact same chipset as the iMac Pro and has native support from 10.13 onwards with no kext hacking required.

You'd need to use a 10GbaseT card on the FreeNAS side (Intel X520-T series as opposed to cheaper X520-DA) though to do a direct-connect. I'd suggest a little searching around Hackintosh forums/subreddits, it's not my forte (not an Apple fan) so I won't try to speak authoritatively on it.

Asked the question on the Hackintosh forum and same card was recommended. Good call, I was hoping for something better but should be fine.

I haven't done that direct connection between 2 nics before. Do I need to use a crossover cable and give those nics a separate subnet IP?

Thank you
 

HoneyBadger

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Do I need to use a crossover cable and give those nics a separate subnet IP?
"No" and "Yes" respectively. Crossover went away with adoption of gigabit and the auto-MDIX standard, but you'll want to use a separate subnet in order to force the traffic to flow over the 10Gb interface.
 

JaimieV

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No gateway needed for the 10gig connection. I have my iMac Pro set up like this, Internet over the wifi (10.0.0.0/24) and NAS over the 10gigE connection (10.0.10.0/24).

I'm finding with the Big Sur beta that despite the NAS being set at MTU 9000, if I set the Mac to 9000 ssh/rsync work to the NASes but SMB sharing doesn't and wedged Finder, very annoying. Worked fine in Catalina. I get ~900meg/sec read/write to my primary NAS with MTU 9000 and under 400 at MTU 1500, so I hope it gets fixed.
 

Dave Hob

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Thank you for sharing that

Not sure I understand the last part

I'm finding with the Big Sur beta that despite the NAS being set at MTU 9000, if I set the Mac to 9000 ssh/rsync work to the NASes but SMB sharing doesn't and wedged Finder, very annoying. Worked fine in Catalina. I get ~900meg/sec read/write to my primary NAS with MTU 9000 and under 400 at MTU 1500, so I hope it gets fixed.
 

JaimieV

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It's just a heads-up in case you're playing with the Big Sur / macOS 11 beta; if you set MTU to 9000 and it breaks sharing, that's a current bug in the beta.
 
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