Due mostly to an extremely good deal at the end of last week, I'm getting a mirrored pair of 250 GB SSDs to add to my work machine. As 250 GB is not enough to hold all of the data that's currently on the machine, I'm going to have to be selective about what I put on the SSDs. Which leads to the question I'm currently considering; whether or not it's worth putting my machine's system filesystem on the SSDs, or whether I should use all of the space for a ZFS pool.

(As is the modern way, my system filesystem has / , /usr , and /var all in a single large filesystem.)

The largest downside of putting my system filesystem on the SSDs is that it would consume at least 60 GB of the limited SSD space for good, and probably more so I had a safety margin for various sorts of space usage there (my current root filesystem is about 80 GB, but I'd likely offload some of the things that normally use space there). A secondary downside is that I would have to actively partition the SSDs instead of just giving them to ZFS as whole disks (even on Linux, ZFS is a bit happier to be handed whole disks). I'm using enough disk space for my own data that I'd like to move to the SSDs that losing 60-80 GB of space hurts at least a bit.

(In theory one might worry about /var/log and /var/log/journal seeing constant write traffic. In practice write endurance doesn't seem to be a big issue with SSDs these days, and these particular ones have a good reputation.)

The largest downside of not putting my system filesystem on the SSDs is of course that I don't get SSD performance for it. The big question to me is how much this matters on my system. On the one hand, certainly one of the things I do is to compile code, which requires a bunch of programs and header files from /usr and so on, and I would like this to be fast. On the other hand, my office machine already has 32 GB of RAM so I would hope that the compiler, the headers, and so on are all in the kernel's buffer cache before too long, at which point the SSD speed shouldn't matter. On the third hand, I don't have any actual numbers for how often I'm currently reading things off disk for / as opposed to already having them in memory. I can certainly believe that a modern system loads random scattershot programs and shared libraries and so on from / and /usr on a routine basis, all with relatively random IO, and that this would be accelerated by an SSD.

If I was really determined enough, I suppose I would first try out a SSD root filesystem to see how much activity it saw while I did various activity on the system. If it was active, I'd keep it; if it wasn't, I'd move the root filesystem back to HDs and give the whole SSDs to ZFS. The problem with this approach is that it involves several shifts of the root filesystem, each of which is a disruptive pain in the rear (I probably want to boot off the SSDs if the root filesystem is there, for example). I'm not sure I'm that enthused.

(I'm not interested in trying to make root-on-ZFS work for me, and thus have the root filesystem sharing space flexibly with the rest of the ZFS pool.)

(What I should really do here is watch IO stats on my current software RAID mirror of the root filesystem to see how active it is at various times. If it's basically flatlined, well, I've got an answer. But it sure would be handy if someone had already investigated this (yes, sometimes I'm lazy).)

Sidebar: the caching alternative

In theory Linux now has several ways to add SSDs as caches of HD based filesystems; there's at least bcache and dm-cache. I've looked at these before and my reaction from then still mostly stands; each of them would require me to migrate my root filesystem in order to set them up. They both do have the advantage that I could use only a small amount of disk space on the SSDs and get a relatively significant benefit.

They also both have the disadvantage that the thought of trying to use either of them for my root filesystem and getting the result to be reliable in the face of problems gives me heartburn (for example, I don't know if Fedora's normal boot stuff supports either of them). I'm pretty sure that I'd be a pioneer in the effort, and I'd rather not go there. Running ZFS on Linux is daring enough for me.