Should I be concerned with wear leveling/trim when upgrading to 2.4?

TrevorG

We are looking to upgrade from 64-bit NanoBSD 2.3 to a full installation of pfSense 2.4. I have read https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/install/upgrading-64-bit-nanobsd-2-3-to-2-4.html and saw the section that says:

There is no write protection of the firewall disk/media. If the target disk is sensitive to writes, the use of RAM disks for /tmp and /var can be manually enabled after the conversion.
Depending on the age and quality of the original disk/media, replacing the media may be warranted.

If we upgrade, which is a full installation, should we be concerned with wear leveling/trim on the drive? Is this something that is now automatically enabled or do we manually need to do so? Unfortunately I don't have specific drive to reference for you as many of our pfsense devices have different drives over the years, but in general newer ones have m.2 drives.

Any thoughts, input, or suggestions is helpful.

jimp

If you use ZFS you won't have to worry about anything. Trim and noatime are handled naturally, wear leveling is up to the disk controller.

TrevorG

I appreciate your informative response. It looks like during install the default is UFS and that you need to choose ZFS. alt text

Would you say that ZFS is the better choice unless the system you have really low RAM?

jimp

If it's a moderate size disk then RAM isn't a huge concern. I don't have any specific disk size vs RAM consumption recommendations, but I've gotten away with ZFS even on some really low-RAM VMs when testing.