Low power mini-pc + sshd for storage

[jaceqp]

Hi there.
I'm about to replace my HP 800 G1 with HP 600 G4 as low-power Proxmox host. For now I barely use it on my homelab - mainly LXC Pi-Hole etc.
Since I'm about to finally switch to nvme support I'm planning to use NVME for host os + some light vm/containers plus small NAS/DLNA and/or NextCloud on 2,5" drive. Now, I wonder if there are any benefits/drawbacks using SSHD drive for storage instead of regular HDD. Oh, and most important thing.. since it's a 'hybrid' drive does it need to be extra configured for combining/using drive platter and NAND together? As far as I remember on windows there was some Intel Rapid setup required in order to accelerate drive throughput (some sort of raid-array had to be set).

Ain't gonna SATA SSD for now - don't have spare one atm, also not planning to invest more for now - in future: probably.

 

[justinclift]

As a data point, I've used some 4TB Seagate SSHD's with TrueNAS (for a few years) as members of a RAIDZ1 pool.

When used in that way, there was no perceptible performance difference from them compared to any other standard 4TB drive.

From my point of view, it's not worth spending any extra money on SSHD's vs standard HDDs.

Bear in mind that I've not used them with Proxmox at all, and probably never will (mostly doing SSD only stuff now).

 

[Dunuin]

You could also use ZFS with proper Enterprise SSDs and SMR CMR HDDs. That way you could create your own kind of hybrid storage by using the HDD for bigger data and an partition of your NVMe SSD for storing all metadata and smaller files. Have a look at the ZFS "special" vdevs.

 

[jaceqp]

You could also use ZFS with proper Enterprise SSDs and SMR HDDs. That way you could create your own kind of hybrid storage by using the HDD for bigger data and an partition of your NVMe SSD for storing all metadata and smaller files. Have a look at the ZFS "special" vdevs.

Worth thinking, not in my case though since I'm about to use small NVME drive (~250G). Mainly for PVE itself plus come LXC, later on perhapse 1-2 VMs. Additional (yet obviously internal) 2,5" drive mailny for storage purposes (small NAS, NextCloud).
Just wondered if having (not hunting for one and buying) SSHD needs some specific tweaks in order to work as designed. I guess I'm about to leave my current setup as it is, i3-8100T, 8-16GB RAM, 250G NVMe ~ 500G hdd will do. Might switch to 1TB if I'll find one laying around somewhere.

 

[justinclift]

and SMR HDDs.

Um, isn't SMR HDDs pretty much exactly the wrong kind of HDD?

Western Digital got in trouble for slipping those into their NAS line(s?), which led to things going poorly for the unfortunate purchasers.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...-for-sneaking-smr-disks-into-its-nas-channel/

 

[Dunuin]

Um, isn't SMR HDDs pretty much exactly the wrong kind of HDD?

You are right, that's a typo. I've meant CMR HDDs. SMR should be avoided when using ZFS (and in general...no matter what you are planning to do with them...aren't even suitable as a drive for backups because of the terrible write performance once you try to write more than several dozens of GBs at once).