Moving boot drive from M.2 to SATADOM

[zebekias]

Hello,

I have a stock Truenas Mini X+ that came with a Western Digital (WDS250G2B0C) M.2 2280 as the boot device. I am using samba shares under MacOS and write performance is abysmal unless I disable sync, or dedicate one of my Samsung EVO 860 PRO SSDs as SLOG. Despite the EVO's latency, it improves write throughput by a lot... this got me considering moving the boot device to SATA DOM, and installing a small Intel Optane M.2 2280 device in its place for SLOG duty (these things have super low latency, great for SLOG duty). Do you see any issue with this idea?

thanks,
Kiriakos

 

[Etorix]

No, on the contrary : A 860 PRO is not suitable for SLOG duty (no PLP).
You'd be better disabling sync writes.

For the change, save your configuration file, change drives, install TrueNAS anew on the SATADOM, load the configuration file. Done.

 

[zebekias]

Thank you Sir, these parts are on the way:

• Intel Optane SSD P1600X SSDPEK1A058GA01 M.2 2280 58GB
• Supermicro Solid State Drive SSD-DM064-SMCMVN1 (64GB SATADOM)

I was at a loss how to get the VGA signal to a monitor, but luckily I found an old VGA monitor (that I almost threw out) to get me through the installation. The VGA to HDMI adapters seem to be hit or miss (from reviews on amazon).

 

[zebekias]

I ended up returning the original 58GB Optane, and got the Intel Optane SSDPEK1A118GA01 (118GB) because it has 2x the endurance and a little better sequential write performance.

The only bummer is I could not over-provision it (disk_resize gives an error, something about namespace management not supported by the device) so I am using it as SLOG without over-provisioning it to 16GB. Is this a big deal?

I set my main data pool to sync=always and write smb performance is ~ 230MB/s which for my use case is good enough and I feel warm and fuzzy with PLP. Happy camper :)

regards,
Kiriakos

 

[Etorix]

Custom over-provisioning is only supported on Optane DC.
This should not be a big deal anyway, as writes and wear should be spread over the whole drive.