New pool...Good idea?

[chris crude]

I purchased 2 Samsung 850 evo 250GB SSDs. Looking toward FreeNas 11, I was thinking about adding a new pool with these disks mirrored for use with VMs, jails, etc. My current pool is 5x2TB (soon to be 5x3TB) Raidz2 and it holds the data in a cifs/smb dataset which is basically a backup of my main pc.

Does this sound wise? Overkill? I am looking for opinions, I have used my FreeNas as a pure Nas with no issues for over a year and want to branch out into some of the more advanced features available. Thanks in advance.

 

[nojohnny101]

Sure, why not? You already bought the SSDs and I can't think of a more practical use for them.

Based upon your limited explanation of your use case and how many VMs you are currently running (which I am guessing is currently none but plan to) and without knowing your hardware (although I will assume you DO NOT have 10 GBe) then I highly doubt your limit right now is the speed of your disks.

So sure, an all SSD pool would make sense for jails/plugins but to be honest with you, I don't know how much of a performance difference you will gain compared to the jails just residing on your current pool.

Like I said though, you already bought them, might as well put them to use!

 

[chris crude]

Sure, why not? You already bought the SSDs and I can't think of a more practical use for them.

Based upon your limited explanation of your use case and how many VMs you are currently running (which I am guessing is currently none but plan to) and without knowing your hardware (although I will assume you DO NOT have 10 GBe) then I highly doubt your limit right now is the speed of your disks.

So sure, an all SSD pool would make sense for jails/plugins but to be honest with you, I don't know how much of a performance difference you will gain compared to the jails just residing on your current pool.

Like I said though, you already bought them, might as well put them to use!

Currently no VMs, havent upgraded to 11 yet, but plan at least a Linux distro and play around with other things. Want to move my Plex server from my Windows box to FreeNas.
Hardware =
Mobo=Supermicro X11SSM-F-O
CPU= Xeon E3-1240 v5
RAM= 2xSamsung M391A2K43BB1-CPB 16GB DDR4-2133 ECC Un-Buffer LP Server Memory
And I did add a 10GB NIC but it is overkill, being direct connected to my Windows box whose speed is limited by 4x4TB WD Red 5400 rpm disks in Raid10.

 

[DrKK]

Want to move my Plex server from my Windows box to FreeNas.

oh god, yes. Do that.

 

[joeschmuck]

Unfortunately 250GB of storage is not many VMs if you think about it but if you needed something speedy for like a Windoze or Linux VM, this should do it, but you need to give it enough RAM to make it work speedy as well so my point is have realistic expectations.

 

[chris crude]

Unfortunately 250GB of storage is not many VMs if you think about it but if you needed something speedy for like a Windoze or Linux VM, this should do it, but you need to give it enough RAM to make it work speedy as well so my point is have realistic expectations.

I really only plan to have 1 or 2 VM in full time use, and of the Linux flavor so I don't think it's footprint will be as large as say windows 7 with all the updates lol. My windows10 box runs a HyperV windows 7 VM that I rarely turn on only to do some light video editing but considered high powered 4 years ago when I built it. If FreeNas needs more RAM, I only use 2 slots at the moment for 32GB, can double it with ease.