A fast ZFS storage pool built from eight NVMe drives
A PCIe-to-eight-M.2 adapter from was filled with eight 4TB Crucial P3 Plus drives to make a fast NVMe ZFS storage pool. The raw storage total is 32TB.
The Crucial P3 Plus drives were not presented as the best choice, but they were already available. The card worked immediately without special setup.
Read speed reached 22GB per second after a RAID card was moved to a different PCIe slot. Even that speed still felt somewhat slow for this setup.
Key points
- The setup uses one that holds eight M.2 drives.
- It uses eight 4TB Crucial P3 Plus s, for 32TB raw capacity.
- The drives are combined into a ZFS storage pool.
- Moving a RAID card to another PCIe slot helped reach 22GB per second read speed.
- A Mac mini cannot use this card directly because it has no internal PCIe slot.