A couple things: - The ZIL is used exclusively for synchronous writes - critical for VMs, databases, NFS shares, and other applications requiring strict write

A couple things: - The ZIL is used exclusively for synchronous writes - critical for VMs, databases, NFS shares, and other applications requiring strict write consistency. Many conventional workloads won't benefit. Use `zilstat` to monitor. - The cheap 16GB Optane devices are indeed great in terms of latency, but they were designed primarily for read caching and have significantly limited write speeds. If you need better throughput, look for the larger Optane models which don't have these limitations. - SLOG doesn't need to be mirrored - the only risk is if your SLOG device fails at the exact moment your system crashes. While mirroring is reasonable for production systems, with these cheap 16GB Optanes you're just guaranteeing they'll wear out at the same time. You could kill one at a time instead. :) - As for those 1TB NVMe devices for read cache (L2ARC) - that's probably overkill unless you have a very specific use case. L2ARC actually consumes RAM to track what's in the cache, and that RAM might be better used for ARC (the main memory cache). L2ARC only makes sense when you have well-understood workload patterns and your ARC is consistently under pressure - like in a busy database server or similar high-traffic scenario. Use `arcstat` to monitor your cache hit ratios before deciding if you need L2ARC.