When I put together my new server, I pooled two old SSDs I'd had sitting around from an old PC into a single big drive.Superficially, combining the drives has worked perfectly so far, but I regularly regret one thing: "striping" them together.Add How-To Geek on Google Add as Preferred Source Follow on Google Discover Striping drives provides a nice bump in speed and capacity, but it also creates a vulnerability that could take out a terabyte of storage.
This is what I did, and how I'd do it differently next time.What I did to combine two drives Two drives turned into one striped ZFS pool Close The two drives I used were two old 500GB SATA SSDs that I'd used for years.They were old, but basically still healthy.
Today, I have them running in my Proxmox server, but they're not just sitting there as two independent drives, they're "striped." When you "stripe" two drives, data you write is split across both drives but duplicated.That effectively lets you treat them as a single combined drive.Mine are used to store ISOs, VMs, containers, and a few short-term copies of files I'm working with.
Related Backing up isn’t enough: A modern guide to ZFS on Linux It's awesome—but it, sadly, has some downfalls.Posts 2 By Arol Wright Free drives became useful Because I striped the drives, reads and writes access both drives simultaneously.This is significantly faster than a single old SSD and miles better than a mechanical drive.
Striping is one way I managed to squeeze a bit more performance out of a few old laptop hard drives I salvaged.Striping like this makes a lot of sense for anyone that has spare hardware and non-essential data.If you just need a fast place to run test VMs or temporarily store files, it is a good way to squeeze some life out of old hardware.
A stripe makes data loss a bigger risk If either SSD dies, the whole pool goes with it Unfortunately, I just store "disposable" information on it.Now it has a smattering of containers and a large repository of ISOs (and prebuilt containers) that I'd really rather not lose.Here, striping has a serious weakness: if one drive fails, the entire pool fails with it.
I've effectively doubled my risk of losing the stored data.That risk has been exacerbated by the age of the drives—as they get older, their NAND will wear, and eventually, one of them fail.I traded speed and a larger pool for roughly double the risk of data loss.
A single larger SSD would have been simpler ZFS striping is pretty easy to set up, but it does complicate troubleshooting some.There are now two physical disks to keep up with and two sets of SMART data that affect "one" pool.If there is an error of any kind, I now have to suss out whether the problem is with one of the drives, both of the drives, some upstream component, or due to software.
A single SSD—or even two non-striped SSDs—would have been much simpler.I'd keep the drives separate in the future.If I were doing this again, I would keep the drives separate.
In fact, I would avoid striping completely unless I had another set of drives on hand to use for mirroring too.Of course, ZFS doesn't have a simple way to create a large combined drive striping—that is the default behavior.That means I'd be stuck with two separate storage entries in Proxmox.
In exchange, I'd not be worried about whether one drive failing will functionally take out SSDs, and I wouldn't have to be nearly as cautious about regular backups.If you have old drives, there are a few different approaches to take.These are the types of data I'd store and the way I'd Disposable data—Use a striped setup.
You get extra speed and combined capacity.Depending on your setup, you could use RAID 0 or ZFS Pure Strip.They're equivalent, but RAID requires hardware-level support, while ZFS is a software feature.
Data you care about—Use a mirror (which resists one failure but only has half the capacity) and maintain backups.Lowest maintenance—Buy one larger, modern SSD.ZFS does all you to a drive, but it only works if you have enough space on one drive to hold everything.
Once you exceed 50% of the combined capacity, that is no longer possible.I've been creating intermittent backups on a mechanical hard drive instead.Reusing old SSDs was good; striping them was not With storage prices skyrocketing and no relief likely for many years, it makes sense to put as much old hardware to use as possible.
Especially things like storage, which ages more gracefully than other components, like a GPU.I made two mistakes simultaneously: striping my drives storing data I don't want to lose on them.I'd recommend avoiding it unless you have enough drives (four) to stripe implement parity drives.
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