Recommendation for a ssds for all flash pool?

[donk]

Howdy
It's been a while since I last posted here.

~ 2,5 years ago I built my current nas, and it's been running flawlessly since. I'm very happy with it
It's running FreeNas 11.1 U6, on an I3-7100 with 32 GB ECC memory and a single 10x4 TB Raidz2 vdev.

I’m looking into making an separate all ssd pool on my freenas server, to improve responsiveness to small file access.
My current raidz2 10x4 TB HDD pool is filling up, currently at 70 % full.
It feels a lot slower than it used to, especially when I'm going through my pictures. There are over 285.000 files. But general file access aren't as snappy as it used to.
So I wan’t to move pictures, documents, music and other small file types I often access to all ssd.

I can't add more memory, since the mini itx motherboard is fully populated with 2x16 GB sticks.

At the moment I have 2 sata ports left, so I’m thinking a mirrored vdev of 2x2 TB ssds.

I won’t be able to use the full bandwidth they offer, since my network is 1gig, and I can’t add a 10gig nic, because I had a brainfart when I built it, and chose a mini-itx case and motherboard… The case didn't work out, so it's been moved to an Fractal Define R6, which is great for nas use.
The pci-e slot is occupied by a hba card.

But what I'm looking for is better responsiveness for all the small files that are growing in numbers into the several hundreds of thousands.
Which a mirrored ssd vdev in it's own pool should do with no problems

But I’m not sure which ssd to chose for an all ssd pool.
I’ve been googling and going trough old posts here, on Reddit, servethehome, and other places I found while googling. But the most results for ssd discussion I've found has been on l2arc/slog/zil recommendations.
And the threads I’ve found on all ssd pools are 2-6 years old, so nothing recent.

I'm not hammering my nas with constant rewrites of data. Ones it’s on there, it’s pretty much static and only being read. Files only get added over time, not changed much after it’s been added.

I’ve been looking at the following 2 TB ssds:
Model name - Price - Write Endurance - warranty

• Kingston SSDNow A400 - 193 Euros - 600 TBW - 3 years
• Crucial MX500 - 228 Euros - 700 TBW - 5 years
• Samsung 870 QVO - 282 Euros - 720 TBW - 3 years
• Crucial Micron 5210 ION - 298 Euros - Unknown TBW - 5 years
• WD Red SA500 - 300 Euros - 1300 TBW - 5 years
• Seagate Barracuda 120 - 301 Euros - 1170 TBW - 5 years
• Samsung 860 EVO - 313 Euros - 1200 TBW - 5 years
• Kingston Data Centre DC450R - 326 Euros - 1301 TBW - 5 years

The Kingston A400 & Samsung 870 Qvo only has 3 year warranty, the rest is 5 years.

The Micron 5210 ION and Kingston DC450R are enterprise SSD’s, so they should handle being in an array pretty well, their write iops are lower than the consumer ssds. But still better way than HDDs. My guess is they don’t have all that turbo/slc caching the consumer ssds have. Probably to make the performance more predictable?

The Samsung 870 QVO and Micron 5210 ION are both QLC nand, but since I’m not hammering my nas with constant rewrites or running vm’s from it, I don’t think it’s an issue.

The price difference from cheapest to most expensive is over a 100 Euros. Those 100 Euros mostly doubles the endurance, but I'm not sure I need it.

From the reviews I’ve been reading about the WD RED SA 500, it’s basically a WD Blue SSD with tweaked firmware, but the 2 TB blue has an endurance is 500 TBW, and I don’t quite get how the doubled the endurance with a different firmware?

I haven’t included any SSD’s I cant afford, but I’m not looking to spend more money than necessary if it doesn’t benefit my use case. It’s not write intensive, so I don’t think the +1000 TBW of the more expensive ones will make a difference for me.
From what I've found on SSDs wearing out in freenas/zfs, it looks like it only being in cases where VM's and such was run from them.

Are any of the ssds I've listed known to work well in freenas? Or am I overthinking it?

The sweet spot looks to be the Crucial MX500, but input is much appreciated

 

[NugentS]

I use the Crucial MX500's on FreeNAS - seem to work OK - but only been running FreeNAS for a few months now
and used them for some years on a QNAP as an iSCSI array. Even had a post on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/freenas/comments/gu3gn9/mx_500_ssd_for_pool/fsikx3b/?context=3

 

[HoneyBadger]

But what I'm looking for is better responsiveness for all the small files that are growing in numbers into the several hundreds of thousands.

This could be a good candidate for a metadata-only or metadata-focused L2ARC device, if you're talking about "directory browsing" or "navigation" responsiveness. Or once TN12 hits, a pair of mirrored metadata-only SSDs as a vdev.

As far as endurance, in a "write once read many" layout, endurance is mostly moot as you've surmised. I thought I read about the Crucial MX and BX series drives throwing false-positive SMART alerts for "Current Pending Sectors" - but it's a bit hard to justify paying an extra 70 EUR for extra endurance that you'll likely never use.

 

[donk]

I use the Crucial MX500's on FreeNAS - seem to work OK - but only been running FreeNAS for a few months now
and used them for some years on a QNAP as an iSCSI array.

Good to know :)

This could be a good candidate for a metadata-only or metadata-focused L2ARC device, if you're talking about "directory browsing" or "navigation" responsiveness.

I briefly thought about adding a l2arc, but the collected size of photos, documents and music are close to 1 TB, so keeping it all in the l2arc seemed unlikely. So I thought a pure ssd pool to be the better option :)

I also posted this question over on the L1T forum, and one there have used the MX500 in zfs in a mirror setup with great results.

I've decided to get the MX500.

Thanks for the input :)

 

[HoneyBadger]

I've decided to get the MX500.

Check this bug report for the note on the "Current pending sector" issue, and the flag you can pass to SMART to ignore it.

https://jira.ixsystems.com/browse/NAS-103155

 

[donk]

Check this bug report for the note on the "Current pending sector" issue, and the flag you can pass to SMART to ignore it.

https://jira.ixsystems.com/browse/NAS-103155

Damn, I don't wanna deal with that.
I've read a bit around after reading your link, and I don't want to deal with that. Period.
Now that I think about it, I had a similar issue back when I built my nas.
I can't remember what SSD it was, but the ssd I had selected for boot drive also threw a lot of false errors. It used either a silicon motion or phison controller.
I "fixed" my problem by getting some Kingston ones who used a Marvell controller.
I'm gonna get some other ones. The only mails I want from my nas is when it starts and finishes a scrub. Nothing else

Thanks for the heads up

 

[NugentS]

Since moving to TrueNAS (as opposed to FreeNAS), 3 of my MX-500's threw a critical error with a pending readable sector (or summat like that). So far the -C 0 flag on each drive seems to have shut them up