SSD (Solid State Drive) and pfSense (Important)

stephenw10

I will built a setup on Trancend, so we'll see if it really fails after couple of months.

That will be useful real world data, especially for me as I'm also runing 133X Transend cards.
Good luck! 8)

Steve

thanatos2k

SSD that can do 2,000,000 writes? Industrial/military?

They show a picture of a fighter jet on the home page:
http://www.delkinoem.com/sata-drive-industrial.html#tab-2

Just hope they don't take the cheap route and use a Kingston SSD in military unmanned aerial vehicles…

Off topic, but I worked at a large defense contractor on some bleeding edge electronics to retrofit Abrams and Bradley vehicles to plug into the Army's FCS network a couple years back, and I remember the SSD used in each one of those babies cost roughly $50K each. And it was definitely not Kingston, lol. I'd imagine a UAV or aircraft would have even greater physical requirements, although I suppose a tank has to withstand a direct RPG/explosives hit which can cause a lot of stress on computer stuff.

Is there any way to verify if a given CF card has wear-leveling? Or can anyone recommend a certain brand/model they know has that feature? I'd hate to buy a cheapie 16gb card thinking it would be safe and have it die a couple months out, but I'd like to save a few bucks over industrial CF at $100/pop.

dreamslacker

Newegg has some low capacity SSDs for cheap.

The 8GB Kingston SSDNow S100 SSD comes in at US$39.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139427
The 16GB at US$49.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139428

A 32GB ADATA SSD costs US$69.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211478
The OCZ Onyx 32GB weighs in at US$74.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227510

With prices like these, I don't think you should bother looking for CF cards with wear levelling controllers. Most of them would be SLC based industrial units that cost an arm and a leg. A SSD would definitely have wear levelling built-in and can plausibly be cheaper.

If you must use a CF card, then you can look for the Transcend CF300 and CF100i units on Newegg, they use SLC NAND and have wear levelling built-in.

jrmitchell83

Couldn't you just use an SLC drive instead of the cheap MLC drives and limit the number of writes? I would think this would be a good compromise for those that want to use packages and the full install. Of course the SLC drive will be more expensive, but you get what you pay for! :)

AllGamer

Thank you very much to every one that participated in this topic

All of the doubts i had about using SSD / Flash Drives has been covered.

Originally I had a hard time trying to figure out which image or install method was best to use, and what's the draw back if i just went with the ISO install method on to a Flash media.

Well the results are quite clear, it's exactly as i though it'll be in the worse case scenario.

Basically after reading all of the above, now I know i'll be better off using the nanobsd (embedded) install than the regular method via the liveCD

another alternative i had in mind, and was planning to use to avoid the COM port annoyance of the nanobsd version, was to use the memstick image, which supposedly is a liveCD in a bootable usb

Now my question is.

would it work if i raw write the pfSense-memstick-2.0-RC3-i386-20110621-1650.img to a SSD?
I'll assume yes.
but then it comes the issue, how to save the configuration, and reload the configs automatically after reboot.

both method has its trade off

the nanobsd is already made and configured to that extend, but it lacks keyaboard and video
the usb stick version offers keyboard and video, but it lacks the option to keep and auto load the configuration changes

hmmmmmmm…...... perhaps a work around is to use something like Universal USB Installer ( http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/ ) that works for most linux/bsd liveCDs, yet you can keep the changes you have made during the session on a CASPER partition or file in the host USB drive, which in our case will be a SSD drive or Flash drive that boots from ATA instead of USB.

Any though on that?

Just for reference the hardware i was using is currently running the old pfsense 1.2.3, which i plan to wipe out and install clean using a 8GB Class 6 Transcend Flash Drive on ATA-2 (EIDE) it's an old

Dual Pentium 233 MMX
512 RAM
3x PCI 10/100/1000 Mbit/s 3Com (WAN1+WAN2+LAN)
1x WiFi G (LAN)

so the only upgrade is really replacing the old super slow, noisy and hot, 500Mb SCSI 10Mbyte/ HDD & SCSI controller with a 8GB SD to ATA which maxes out at 16 Mbyte/s

then installing the new pfsense 2.0 to it.

it's a very well kept Antique machine, which server no better purpose than just being a load balancing router/switch/firewall

it's even too slow for a GUI linux :P

Switch

@Switch:

Yes, always have enough. I had first 512 Mb and now there is 2Gb. Snort hogs a lot of memory :), which was my only package running always and couple of diagnostic/testing tool packages like iPerf. Also I installed dashboard when it was relased.

I also deleted the page file at install.

I googled quickly and seems like Ultra III might be SLC type and it's more like professional grade. Kingston Elite Pro is also SLC. So Trancend is MLC http://reviews.pricegrabber.co.uk/laptop-memory/m/47729654/ . Should have bought Extreme III :). But I will built a setup on Trancend, so we'll see if it really fails after couple of months.

I have been going to install dedicated logging service LogAnalyzer on a virtual machine http://loganalyzer.adiscon.com/ . It would be nice to have all logs in database in one place. This should also help continue life of my CF installation if the logs are really written to CF. But I thought that they are only written on local RAM disk, cause there is option Disable writing log files to the local ram disk and they disappear after reboot.

1 GB Kingston Elite Pro gave up. Now I replaced it with Trancend 4 GB 133x and upgraded Intel pci nics to pci-e and pfsense to latest 2.0 RC3. Let's see how long it will last :)

Now GUI seems not so responsive as with 1.2.3. Could be also because of a cheapo Trancend CF.

Eldan

I've done a lot of reading on SSDs and my understanding is that when NAND flash blocks fail due to excessive writes they become read-only, and that early total drive failure is probably a different defect not caused by excessive writes. Even with a worst case scenario (3000 write-limit, 3x write-amplification) the numbers say you should be able to write more than 8 TB to the 8 GB Kingston S100 before it's used up. Even logging 2 GB a day the drive should be useable for 10 years.

Logging and, presumably, graph generation are sequential and the write amplification should be close to 1. Even swapping is mostly sequential.

rekd0514

SSD vs SDHC vs FD vs CF

Do you really need the extra speed of a SSD or would a cheap SDHC card work great? Why are there many who run CF cards, but hardly any who use FD (flash drive) or SDHC cards? Is the SSD solely for the reliability over CF and SDHC?

Just curious, since I am deciding on what I will use when I build a pfsense box.

Eldan

You need to use something the motherboard can recognize as a bootable device. A lot of popular embedded hardware is still CF based.

stephenw10

CF supports IDE directly, with a purely passive adapter, so it can easily be used in place of a hard drive. That's why it's present on many motherboards intended for embedded applications.

Steve

ScottNJ

Just as a follow up on the original topic on SSD drives and pFsense. Even with a RRD logging or a ton of packages installed pFsense does not write enough data to cause modern SSD's to fail due to write wear. I think many of these early failures are just do to it being such a new technology and they are being rushed to the market because it's new hot technology.
And since they're solid state, they tend to just fail abruptly unlike traditional mechanical drives.

joako

@rekd0514:

SSD vs SDHC vs FD vs CF

Do you really need the extra speed of a SSD or would a cheap SDHC card work great? Why are there many who run CF cards, but hardly any who use FD (flash drive) or SDHC cards? Is the SSD solely for the reliability over CF and SDHC?

Just curious, since I am deciding on what I will use when I build a pfsense box.

SDHC is horrible and slow! Absolutely use CF instead!

slth

I am trying to understand how pfSense handles disk I/O on a normal install. I run it as a guest in ESXi thus it is easy to monitor the amount of writes given a period of time:

As you can see, on average, there is a 24 KBps write rate to local drive.

What is causing these writes? I always presumed that even the normal image would try to do as much in ram as possible.

dreamslacker

@rekd0514:

SSD vs SDHC vs FD vs CF

Do you really need the extra speed of a SSD or would a cheap SDHC card work great? Why are there many who run CF cards, but hardly any who use FD (flash drive) or SDHC cards? Is the SSD solely for the reliability over CF and SDHC?

Just curious, since I am deciding on what I will use when I build a pfsense box.

Cheap SDHC cards are generally slower than CF cards of the same price bracket.

Also, SDHC cards will almost definitely need an active converter that costs more than their CF counterparts.
e.g. An SD to Sata covertor costs ~US$14 - US$20 whereas a CF to SATA converter costs ~$3 - US$4.00.

CF is also compatible with IDE so a passive convertor (CF to PATA) can be had for a much lower price. Typical online price from a wholesale site like Dealextreme would probably cost you US$2.40 inclusive of international shipping.

I've ran pfSense on thumbdrives in production environments before. They work albeit slower than a CF-SATA and there were other issues to take care of (I had to hack the loader.conf to add the delay for mounting USB devices back then). In general, I've had better luck with CF cards compared to thumbdrives in terms of reliability as well.

thevoice

Hi,

I've beed using Industrial CF cards and SSD drives since about 10 years for industrial automation and routers/NAS and never had write issue… you are talking about 10000 writes this is strange because every datasheet I read are talking about 10 000 000 writes. Don't know which models you are using but they must be very cheap...

tesna

damn.. I just found this thread. I guess I need to replace my 128GB SSD to regular HDD in my pfsense box before it fails.

stephenw10

Almost certainly you don't. There is a huge amount of misinformation and paranoia in this thread.

Steve

thevoice

SSD drives are too expensive when you need only to write some log and RRD informations, use CF cards :

http://www.memorydepot.com/ssd/listcat.asp?catid=icf4000

2 000 000 writes/erases

stephenw10

I agree with this.
The reasons you might want to use an ssd in pfSense are: heat, power consumption and reliability. In no particular order. However in all of those usage cases you would use the smallest drive necessary. The only time you might use something larger is for a fast squid cache; I have yet to form an opinion on that. ;)

Steve

Supermule

Why not use disks from INNODISK??

They have DOM that sits directly in a SATA port. You can even get them in IDE. Very easy and stable.