Truenas storage for XCP-ng VMs - flash or spinning drives?

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
1

OK, a question as I hope I’m going to be getting budget to replace a couple old servers for my VM storage. XCP-ng and Truenas Scale (Community).

I was planning on going with a 12+ bay NVME server with only about 6 disks installed, I only need about 4TB worth of space (after raid creation, etc.). Price is still a little cheaper to install spinning enterprise disks to get that small amount of storage, and price is always a consideration. That said, the spinning disks would probably require 8 drives, need to look at performance.

I’m also thinking about write cycles on the NVME and if that is even a factor here. The NVME I was going to use are one of the choices that Supermicro sells, I think the choices are all Micron Enterprise drives. Not sure what they are shipping for the enterprise spinning drives, but I’d buy any/all storage while buying the servers, they get really good prices on drives due to volume.

2

Are you only looking for raw storage capacity or are you looking for IOPs also? I’d say it depends on your workloads and that would determine your answer on spinning rust or flash.

3

Consumer NVMe don’t perform that well due to their low que depth and lack of power loss prevention which means they will have higher latency.

4

This would be enterprise grade only, I think I was looking at 1.2TB flash with raidz2 to give me around 4TB useable.