PfSense and SSDs
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Saw somewhere on this forum a post that said pfSense has a problem with SSDs. That if you don't use 'embedded' or 'nanobsd' versions it will kill an SSD quickly, but using either version takes out the VGA, and I'm not open to using the serial stuff. The post was about five years old, so wondering if this problem has been solved. I think I have pfSense 2.2.6. Can I safely use a SSD, or do I need to buy a regular HDD?
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Old information from the era when SSDs weren't all that solid yet.
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Agreed.. that information is OLD and most it was just FUD from the get go from people not understanding the life of an SSD.. Yes they have limited writes.. So do freaking HDDs.. To be honest pfsense does very little writes to the disk.. especially compared to say a user using an os like windows.
I run a bunch of vms on an esxi host, using a SSD as the data store. So all the vms are reading and writing to this SSD.. I can tell you I am not concerned in the least to lower the life of the ssd..
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Some modern SSDs have the same or more writes than mechanical drives. The only difference is the SSD is faster which allows it to reach its limit faster. That said, don't get cheap crap. Look at reviews. If you're concerned about reliability, don't get the latest greatest, look at something that has been out for a year. Or use GEOM RAID1 and get two different types of SSDs, so they shouldn't fail at the same time for the same reason.