Hello fellow Proxmox enjoyers!
I have questions regarding the ZFS disk IO stats and hope you all may be able to help me understand.
Setup (hardware, software)
I have Proxmox VE installed on a ZFS mirror (2x 500 GB M.2 PCIe SSD) rpool . The data (VMs, disks) resides on a seperate ZFS RAID-Z1 (3x 4TB SATA SSD) data_raid.
I use ~2 TB of all that, 1.6 TB being data (movies, videos, music, old data + game setup files, ...).
I have 6 VMs, all for my use alone, so there's not much going on there.
Question 1 - costant disk write going on?
I have a monitoring setup (CheckMK) to monitor my server and VMs. This monitoring reports a constant write IO operation for the disks, ongoing, without any interruption, of 20+ MB/s.

I think the monitoring gets the data from zpool iostat, so I watched it with watch -n 1 'sudo zpool iostat', but the numbers didn't seem to change.
It has been the exact same operations and bandwidth read / write for the last minute or so (after taking a while for writing this, it now lists 543 read ops instead of 545).
Every 1.0s: sudo zpool iostat
capacity operations bandwidth
pool alloc free read write read write
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
data_raid 2.29T 8.61T 545 350 17.2M 21.5M
rpool 4.16G 456G 0 54 8.69K 2.21M
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
The same happens if I use -lv or -w flags for zpool iostat.
So, are there really constantly 350 write operations going on? Or does it just not update the IO stats all too often?
Question 2 - what about disk longevity?
This isn't my first homelab-setup, but it is my first own ZFS- and RAID-setup. If somebody has any SSD-RAID or SSD-ZFS experiences to share, I'd like to hear them.
The disks I'm using are:
- 3x Samsung SSD 870 EVO 4TB for
data_raid - 2x Samsung SSD 980 500GB M.2 for
rpool
Best regards from a fellow rabbit-hole-enjoyer.
I do understand where you're coming from, but judging from my personal experience with a friend who became a religious extremist (among other things), I don't know if this is actually possible with some people.
This is an honest plea for helping me understand and find a solution.
I tried to talk about his religious views and the world and people for 1.5 years. Nothing helps. Words seemingly never reach this guy, except they reinforce his faith. He would also never go to therapy, as "therapists don't want to help you, they just want your money".
He rather declared that he (and every human on earth) has been born without empathy and is unable to reach any acceptable moral values on his own and that raping and killing children is just part of his "good god, who's love first and foremost" than accepting that literally anything he heard about his faith isn't as good and pure as he sees it.
He's not my friend anymore, but
The things outlined above are only a small part of what he told me about his faith. I feel like this one is lost for good.
To me it seems like there's nothing anybody can do, we just need to wait until real bad shit hits the fan.