Best use for random enterprise SSDS and some 970 Evos for my general "workload"

[NicholasJS]

So, it's a long story but I had a bunch of Intel 960gb D3-S4510s dropped on me with some Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1Tb drives.

I've pawned off a bunch of them and now I have 2 of the D3s and one evo left.

I've been thinking of what to do with these and I think that the correct answer is "put them in a different system" but I'm wondering if there may be better things I can do with them. My system is pretty much already overkill.

My general workload is storing some customer data here and there, file sharing and streaming using plex, hosting a minecraft server for some friends and their kids, and doing some VM things for testing purposes, usually with SQL Server (proofs of concept, not data heavy) or something in Linux. I wouldn't call anything I do IO heavy and my cache hit rate with 128 gb of ram is generally > 90. I'm always >90gb of ARC.

Currently, my options appear to be, for the D3s
Use the 2x D3s as metadata drives for my main pool, which is 64tb in 16 gb drives with Z2. This seems kind of unnecessary because I don't seem to have much metadata that doesn't just get cached in ARC so I would effectively create more risk for minimum benefit.

Replace the SSDS (2x mirrored 512gb 860 EVOs) I use for my VMs, jail settings and system pool with the D3s. Seems like a waste, the pool is usually pretty static.

Add the D3s as a separate pool and do ? with them.

Evo:
Stripe it and copy my music library to it for plex so all of that music just gets instantly accessed.

1TB L2ARC for data or metadata and bask in the sub 10% hit rate. This would reduce ARC from what I understand.

Another thing I could do is just experiment and see what happens. I already have the hardware I just don't have the time right now.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, even silly things that would be interesting to try out but aren't supported, so long as they won't brick my pool. I have backups but it would be a pain to pull them.

Thanks!

 

[sretalla]

Use the 2x D3s as metadata drives for my main pool, which is 64tb in 16 gb drives with Z2.

Pro: faster metadata writes. Faster metadata access when metadata is ejected from ARC (metadata isn't treated as more important than other data in that regard, so with large reads, you'll potentially have it all ejected at some point).
Con: increased risk compared to RAIDZ2 of 2 disks fault tolerant (I think that's what you were referring to). Probably much more capacity than you can use... you could set it for small files too, which may use more of it.

1TB L2ARC for data or metadata and bask in the sub 10% hit rate.

Pro: you can more-or-less try it for free as L2ARC can be added and removed on the fly. (I'm currently trialling this myself and have now seen a non-zero hit-rate, so maybe there's something to it... I didn't use 1TB though... I would use much less than that, probably 50GB is enough, so you might still do some of the other things)
Con: robs you of at least some ARC... likely not much though.

Replace the SSDS (2x mirrored 512gb 860 EVOs) I use for my VMs, jail settings and system pool with the D3s.

Pro: better endurance drives than your current ones.
Con: as you said, maybe better use cases could be found.
I think this might be the best though...

 

[NicholasJS]

@sretalla Thank you for your response.

Yep, I was referring to fault tolerance when it comes to the D3s as metadata.

Since I don't have too much time on my hands atm I am just going to go with the easier solutions.

- Take the Evo and use it as L2ARC as you suggested. I might format it down to 50-100 gb and add it via the command line (Unless you can do this with the GUI, I haven't seen anything suggesting I can and posts about older versions of truenas suggesting I cannot). It still leaves me with the rest of the drive to figure out but it's a start. If you can think of something quick to try let me know.

- Replace the EVOs with the D3s. If I had 3 of them and enough sata ports I might of tried a mirror for metadata + small files but I'm a tiny bit paranoid. Everything that I care about losing is backed up to another system so it might be worth a try though. If I had more time for testing to see how performance is affected I'd give it a go.