end up as those servers' rootfs storage, not being used to their fullest extent as-is. Those servers consume only a couple dozen GB of storage on their rootfs, so I think it would be prudent to allocate the remaining ~300GB to other purposes — say, a ZFS pool. I remember reading about this, and concluded that the desire to only make ZFS pools out of entire drives, is mostly due to seek time on mechanical drives. So on SSD's, this doesn't matter. But on a system that would use part of that SSD as its active rootfs, and then the other part for ZFS.. maybe they'd still interfere?
Side note: SSD storage over USB for servers is certainly advisable regardless. If anything, it'll reduce your iowait, which on USB storage can really confuse the kernel — even if the common writes are to storage media that are not that USB stick.
I'm puzzled about your question: 1) you use only a couple dozen of GB and you ask whether to buy 1 TB SSD 2) you repeat the word server often but your system has only a few GB, most of them unused 3) you refer about sparing some GB as you don't want to allocate unused disk space, so what else what the disk space will be for? 4) server + USB storage? WTF?
Sorry about that, this involves several machines and assumes familiarity of the network setup. I should've been clearer. There's a laptop (Lenovo IdeaPad Y700), of which the secondary mechanical hard drive is currently behaving erroneously. This drive is something I'd like to replace with an SSD, either 500GB as a bandaid, or 1/2TB as a more permanent solution. There's other machines (ThinkStation S10, Supermicro H8SMI, ThinkPad x220, ...) that I run as servers, which currently run on various levels of reliability and storage configurations. However, some of these machines boot from USB sticks — making said USB sticks their rootfs. This is something I'd like to replace with a proper SSD, or at least a mechanical hard drive. Even when connected over USB, these storage media would be able to better saturate the USB connection's bandwidth. This would in turn make the kernel less confused about the system load due to iowait, and allow it to make better scheduling decisions.
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