I have a few decent, but differently-sized SSDs lying around that I would like to use in a stripe in Freenas. The sizes are: 2 x 240GB, 1 x 256GB, 1 x 1TB.
Using a stripe, this gets me to ~1.73TB. Now Freenas warns that differently sized disks are not recommended in a VDEV; however, this warning seems to have its roots in avoiding this scenario when using Raid-Z, as one would obviously lose space.
My intentions for this pool would be:
- a 500GB ZVOL shared over iSCSI for an ESXi running up to 10 VMs, with daily backed up snapshots (copy the daily snapshot to a different pool)
- use the rest of the space as fast throw-away space (i.e. the data there is not backed up and if it's lost, then nobody cares)
So my question is: What are the potential implications I am looking at? What will the performance be (IOPS and throughput esp. for the VMs)? Any reason I should not do this?
Thanks!
