Today I replaced my HDDs with SSDs
A few days back, yet another HDD betrayed me and died in my VM storage pool RAID array. This pissed me off and I decided I was done with mechanical drives.
So I used my credit card and bought 4 SSDs to fill up my storage bay. I spent the day:
- Cloning all my VMs' logical volumes at a slow rate, because one HDD was already dead and loosing another one at this point would have been catastrophic.
- Creating the RAID5 array and reconfiguring the iSCSI target.
- Initiating a new LVM shared volume group and restoring back all the logical volumes.
Now it's working smoothly. I gained a lot of fluidity, more than I would have expected.
I just noticed that my new SSDs were not supporting TRIM commands. They are Crucial BX500, and they have Active Garbage Collection, which is managed by the disk firmware itself and offer no control not visibility from the host OS, which is embarrassing. Moreover, this mechanism is triggered only when the disks are idle (but still powered), which won't happen often in my case. Welp, rookie mistake I guess.
2025-01-04 · 1 year ago · 👍 ps
1 Comment
🐐 boringbbsuser · Mar 03 at 23:42:
I think I have positive experience with the Crucial MX-500, but it's been a while.
I tend to be pretty picky about SSDs -- the low end ones can really bite you!
I personally wouldn't bother with RAID 5. On the simpler end of the scale, RAID 1 can work (though can introduce some problems at the same time.) If I wanted something like RAID 5, I would go with ZFS, and RAIDZ-1 or RAIDZ-2.
I am not sure how ZFS is on Linux these days, but on FreeBSD it sure worked well.
I've generally found harddrives to be reliable, but some are way better than others. Curious, were you smart testing them with any regularity? I've found the long smart test works pretty well.