2 SSDs as cache - Striped?

[Percy]

I have 2x 512Gb Samsung 860 PRO drives (MLC) ready to go in to my pool of spinning disks as cache.
But I wonder what the best set up would be for this. I want to have both write and read cache but to be able to max out my 10gbe connection they need to be striped.

So should i stripe these drives before I add them to the pool via the motherboard or is there another way I should go about this.

I'm not sure what happens if i add the 2 drives to the pool, I don't think it stripes the drives automatically, or?

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

the Samsung 850Pro was very disappointing as ZIL and I think also the 860 Pro will be.
Because all prosumer SSD have no good 4k sync capacities.

I would recommend you SSD like the Samsung SM883 or the Intel DC S4610 or any other SSD at this enterprise level.
If you use a slow SSD (Slow means bad 4k sync capacities) your system gets slower and not faster.

 

[Percy]

Thanks for the info. I just though any decent MLC drive with "OK" TBW values would give me a nice boost.
This is a home lab and personal file server so It will not be used for anything business critical.

That being said i could not find any of the drives you mentioned for sale but the new optane drives seems like a good option here. At least according to: https://www.servethehome.com/exploring-best-zfs-zil-slog-ssd-intel-optane-nand/

 

[wolfgang]

Yes, I forgot about the optane.
It works great and has the lowest latency.

 

[wolfgang]

But consider if you have a home lab the ZIL boost only the small sync writes.
All large writes like video data will be written directly.
Also, a ARCL2 is only necessary if you have a real huge ZFS data pool.
ARCL2 consume memory what you can better use for ARC and Memory are always faster than a fast SSD.

 

[Jarvar]

Any follow up on these? I am thinking of building a Proxmox box as well. I am considering both of those Samsung SM883 and the Intel DC S4610 drives. Only thing is that the Intel is TLC and the Samsung is MLC. Other than that I heard their performance is similar and the Intel's have been rock solid in the Enterprise domain.