SSD / RAID question

[azop]

I'm planning on deploying 2 x Samsung 850 Pro SSD's in a Dell R420 server and probably a 1TB HDD for backups. The server has a Dell H710 w/ 512MB cache installed.

Is there anything wrong with doing hardware RAID-1 with 2 x SSDs? I'm not experienced enough to setup and maintain zfs.

 

[LnxBil]

One thing is clearly the TRIM/DISCARD controversy to enable or not enable it and stuff like that (ZFS does NOT support TRIM/DISCARD this in Proxmox at the moment). With a hardware raid controller, it is dependent on the controller capabilities. Technically, you can put ssds in a ordinary hardware raid, but it will not be as fast as is could be and there could be drawbacks along the road, but it works.

Besides that, your SSDs are consumer (or prosumer) grade, but not enterprise grade. Depends on your workload if you saturate the write cycles quickly or not but the setup should work for SOHO environment perfectly.

I have only experience with "real" enterprise grade SSDs with SSD-enabled raid controllers, which work great.

 

[Richard Leishman]

In my experience with consumer SSD's, I set the SSD's to JBOD on the hardware raid controller and software raid-1 SSD's as unless you have an expensive/new raid card you may have speed/support issues. Also I tend to leave 10-20% of the SSD free to allow for dead blocks as you wear out the SSD.

This may be old methods now...

You may also find that if you use consumer SSD's, in some servers the fans may run 100% as they can not detect the temperature sensor on the drive.