At the moment I have my NAS setup as a Proxmox VM with a hardware RAID card handling 6 2TB disks. My VMs are running on NVMEs with the NAS VM handling the data storage with the RAIDed volume passed through to the VM direct in Proxmox. I am running it as a large ext4 partition. Mostly photos, personal docs and a few films. Only I really use it. My desktop and laptop mount it over NFS. I have restic backups running weekly to two external HDDs. It all works pretty well and has for years.
I am now getting ZFS curious. I know I’ll need to IT flash the HBA, or get another. I’m guessing it’s best to create the zpool in Proxmox and pass that through to the NAS VM? Or would it be better to pass the individual disks through to the VM and manage the zpool from there?
That doesn’t sound right. Also random writes don’t kill SSDs. Total writes do and you can see how much has been written to an SSD in its SMART values. I’ve used SSDs for swap memory for years without any breaking. Heavily used swap for running VMs and software builds. Their total bytes written counters were increasing steadily but haven’t reached the limit and haven’t died despite the sustained random writes load. One was an Intel MacBook onboard SSD. Another was a random Toshiba OEM NVMe. Another was a Samsung OEM NVMe.