Uncategorized – Kirk Martinez

How are my SSDs doing?

October 17, 2026October 17, 2026Kirk Martinez

I was curious to see how the samsung 9100 pro 2TB SSD was performing in my desktop (7950X on X670E motherboard). 13GB/s sequential read/write was found by their “Magician” benchmark. random IOPS read: 1.6G write 1.35G (it does use PCIe v5!) – it did reach 55and 68C temps though. In comparison the 980 pro 2TB reached about 6GB/s and just under 1G IOPS (at 53C). SMART shows no errors after their 10 and16TB writes (phew!).

In my NAS box the used Intel and Samsung Enterprise SSDs are not showing any errors either (not surprising as they rarely get masses of R/W). I setup Truenas to do some SMART tests (which showed up a miserable HD I replaced). Although the 6 SSDs are in mirrored pairs a random big image reads at 1.5GB/s (in NAS) and 600MB/s over the 10Gbe ethernet to my desktop win11… nice!

using ssd as ZFS cache

April 19, 2026April 19, 2026Kirk Martinez

wow this actually works – adding an ssd as a zfs cache means regularly used files are fetched from the SSD once read once (a bit like the ram cache but persists between reboots). My 2 x 8TB mirror VDEV shows up with the cache drive alongside.

zpool stats show the ssd is almost full of cached blocks:

using a sata power switcher

April 19, 2026April 19, 2026Kirk Martinez

In a Linux dev PC I have four old hard disks I only use sometimes (zfs raidz1) so I bought this wierd gadget:

before powering up you can turn disks on/off! power is just one previously used sata input. Probably useful for other sata-powered things too..

expanding (true) NAS storage with some server SSDs

January 21, 2026January 21, 2026Kirk Martinez

Out Truenas server needs storage boosts occasionally.

This time I ebayed a couple of intel 2TB server ssds and added them to the pool.

Easy! except for the extra 2 sata ports I hoped to add on the Expansion Card (Key A+E PCI Express to SATA Dual Port JMB582) wasn’t recognised by truenas so I used two spare ports on the pcie adapter I had already installed (so not all ports are used it will become a case of swap-out disks to upgrade). A feature of truenas is that the new disks are now empty and get files/blocks eventually – its a space boost not really a speed boost.