Boot drive for maybe other things also?

Ianm_ozzy

Dabbler
Joined
Mar 2, 2020
Messages
43
Hi all.

So I have been looking into options to modify my machine and dump the usb drives as boot.
I am looking at long term.
They are presently not recommended and may not be a boot option at some point.
So I have 2 x 240GB SSDs with one in the freenas machine.
It has some Vms drives on there.
I may move them over to the main hard drive drive pool.

Then put the other SSD into the machine.
Then replace the usb boot disks with the SSDs.
A waste of space maybe, but I want to use the extra space for a few things.

I did find this which was interesting.

So I may want to use two SSDs in a mirrored config for:

Boot drive
A Zil if it is a benefit.
L2arc
Also a chunk of the space for a lancache storage (gaming download cache).

Specific sizes are yet to be decided.

More sata adapters in the machine is not practical for various reasons. I have 4 for hard drives and 2 for sata SSDs

Is this practical?

I wish to upgrade to TrueNAS at some stage.
Will TrueNAS like this?

I found this page which is useful.

Has anyone done anything similar?


Also will a Zil help with longevity if used in a hard drive storage pool of the hard drives.


Useful info appreciated.

Thank you
 

sretalla

Powered by Neutrality
Moderator
Joined
Jan 1, 2016
Messages
9,702
will a Zil help with longevity if used in a hard drive storage pool of the hard drives.
No, and it will hurt the longevity of the SSDs.

Will TrueNAS like this?
Officially, no. It may not break (but there's no guarantee as it won't have been tested on such a setup, you take your own risk here).

Is this practical?
Maybe some of it... I would skip the L2ARC and SLOG (ZIL) if you don't want to prematurely kill the SSDs.

Has anyone done anything similar?
See here: https://www.truenas.com/community/t...-of-larger-ssds-for-boot-pool-and-data.81409/
 

Constantin

Vampire Pig
Joined
May 19, 2017
Messages
1,828
As @sretalla mentioned, partitioning a boot drive and hosting other things on it is possible but can only be done from the command line, may get broken with time thanks to system software changes, and hence is discouraged unless you know exactly what you are doing.

You didn't give us a model # on the SSD, but I'm guessing from the capacity that it's a garden variety SSD, as opposed to something more exotic like Optane. The 240GB drives are likely too small to be much use as a L2ARC. They are also likely too slow, not wear-resistant enough to be a good candidate for a SLOG. They might make a good playground for your VMs in addition to a smaller boot partition but again, you'd have to partition these drives and then work at all that from the CLI, IIRC.

Patricks guide is a good one if you really are determined to go down that path and a boot pool / VM playground. But remember that @Patrick M. Hausen knows what he's doing and can fix it if it breaks, all from the CLI.
 
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