Hi there,

I’m not an expert in ZFS (I know enough to be a dangerous fanboy, haha), but I have an unraid server with two ZFS pools: one with HDDs and one with SSDs.

I recently bought a new 4TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD and want to add it to the SSD pool.

My initial thought was to add the 990 to the pool as a new VDEV. However, I’m also considering recreating the SSD pool with two drives in a strip configuration. I don’t mind disk failures because I regularly snapshot and back up the SSD pool to the HDD pool.

The main goal is to have access to all 5TB of storage.

I’m wondering if it’s a good idea to combine these drives into one pool or if it would be better to create three separate pools.

  • vonProteusOPEnglish
    1·
    16 days ago

    Thanks for your perspective.

    I decided to go with the new vdev because:

    • That way, I have access to all 5TB (1TB from the old SSD and 4TB from the new one).
    • One pool is easier to manage than two.
    • I know that I don’t have auto-healing, and if either of the SSDs fails, I lose the whole pool, and I accept that.

    I did this via:
    zpool add ssdPool /dev/disk/by-id/nvme-Samsung_SSD_990_PRO_4TB-part3

    I don’t like ext4 because it is not easily backupable (it doesn’t have snapshots, which are moved periodically to hddPool).