SSD wear with ZFS compared to BTRFS

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ptersilie

New Member
Jan 19, 2026
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Hi folks,

I'm looking to use Proxmox on my home server and I'm struggling to make a decision on whether to use ZFS or btrfs or something else entirely. My home server is mostly used to backup photos (immich) and run a few services (jellyfin, paperless, home assistant, etc).

I thought I had made up my mind to use a ZFS RAID1 mirror but then I started reading about SSD wear which now has me worried. I have two 4TB consumer drives:

- Crucial P3 Plus SSD 4TB M.2 NVMe
- Samsung SSD 870 EVO 4TB

I was planning to run the Proxmox OS on the mirror as well to decrease downtime should a drive fail. But I was reading that Proxmox is quite write-heavy (logs, etc) which is then amplified by ZFS. I now know that it is thus suggested to run enterprise SSDs, but I have to work with what I got now. My server also only has 2 drive slots so I can't run Proxmox off of a separate disk either, unfortunately.

Am I worrying too much? Are there things I can do to mitigate SSD wear? Is BTRFS a good alternative (I know it's still experimental but RAID1 appears to be stable)? Any suggestions are very appreciated! Thanks!
 
uzumo said:
Rather than reaching TBW, the slower synchronous I/O and resulting lack of performance is a greater concern.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply! I wasn't really too worried about I/O performance as I imagined the bottleneck when streaming photos, documents, videos is more the WIFI connection rather than the hard drives.

uzumo said:
Wouldn't LVM be an option?
Click to expand...

Before you mentioned it, I didn't realise you can do RAID1 with LVM as well, so I will definitely look into it. What features would I be missing out on compared to ZFS and BTRFS?
 
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