Best configuration for 4HDD and 4 SSD on LSI-9340-8i

[cmdematos]

I purchased an LSI 9340-8i IBM 46C9115 M1215 12GB following some advise on the recommended 8 port LSI internal controllers. This will be mated to an AMD X370 motherboard with an AMD 1600 6 core CPU and 32gb of Ram.

The system above runs Windows 10, but it hosts a FreeNAS with 8Gb of RAM and 2 cores and addresses all of the disks directly (the drives are not enabled on Windows and are only visible from FreeNAS).

The drives are 4x 2TB HDDs and 4x 256Gb Samsung Pro SSDs.

The system will serve NFS shares to a kubernettes cluster as part of a lab (4 windows 10 machines, all with similar or better specs, 40Gb network, Centos VMs running a Kubernettes cluster).

What I would like to do is to run Raid 5 on the HDDs and Raid 10 on the SSDs and fuze of them together into one filesystem that would migrate seldom used data to the HDDs and store all the hot blocks on SSD, the resulting file system would be 6.5Tb total, 6th on HDD in Raid5 + 512gb of SSD. Maximum IO would be 4x SSD read spead and 2x SSD write speed up to 512gb bursts.

I know I can use the SSD as log drives, but log drives are usually small and dont act as read cache. I know too I can setup the two sets of disks and lay a file system over them, but dont know whether its possible to run the fuze drive (which is not a cache, its a single drive that stores frequently read or written data on the SSD and the less used data on the HDD).

Is this possible with FreeNAS?

 

[Chris Moore]

I purchased an LSI 9340-8i IBM 46C9115 M1215 12GB following some advise on the recommended 8 port LSI internal controllers.

Where did you get that advice, because that is not a recommended controller?

 

[Chris Moore]

The system above runs Windows 10, but it hosts a FreeNAS with 8Gb of RAM and 2 cores and addresses all of the disks directly (the drives are not enabled on Windows and are only visible from FreeNAS).

This is a completely unsupported configuration that is likely to cause total data loss.

 

[Chris Moore]

Is this possible with FreeNAS?

NO. This is not how ZFS works. You would need to write some custom software layer over top of ZFS to handle data migration between different pools. What you want to do does not happen in FreeNAS.

 

[garm]

Why mix in FreeNAS at all in this Frankensteinien build? Why not use MS Storage Spaces? It will do something similar to what you want, it just won’t be as good at storage as ZFS.

I’m all for a dual pool configuration, I keep my spinning disk writes as low as possible by running services on an SSD pool.