FYI, M.2 describes a form factor, and SATA is not. You can have a 2.5" SATA drive and an M.2 SATA drive, for example.
Though yes, M.2 SATA drives are generally faster.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
6 points (100.0% liked)
Everything ZFS
306 readers
4 users here now
A community for the ZFS filesystem.
ZFS is an opensource COW filesystem used by enterprise and serious homelabbers for it's data safety and extensive feature set.
OpenZFS is the active branch now developed primarily for Linux with a port to it's FreeBSD roots.
This community is here to answer questions and discuss topics related to the use of ZFS in the wild.
Rules:
As always, the main rule is Don't Be a Dick. Be polite with new users asking questions that you may consider obvious. If you don't have something constructive to offer, downvote and move on.
No dirty deletes: your posts are here for posterity, perhaps the next person will get something out of it, even if it's wrong.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
@0x0 3.5” SATA, 2.5” SATA, and M.2 SATA are all the same speed (assuming they’re all the same version of the SATA specification). The MX500 is a SATA Drive, so it will have the same performance no matter which way you connect it.
For performance vdevs (cache, dedup, log, or special) to improve performance, they need to be noticeably faster than the capacity devices. For example, a SATA SSD makes a good performance vdev for a pool which gets its capacity from spinning disks. Since your pool is already SATA SSDs, a SATA SSD performance vdev won’t help. For a performance vdev to help you, it would have to be NVMe.