Hardware questions & recommendations - 100Mbps and beyond
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…I think at this point, I'll also go for a solution for a 100Mbps connection. When/if I upgrade to 1G/1G, I'll cross that bridge.
Given that, is the Intel D2500CCE Mini-ITX and the build listed sufficient for 100Mps with QoS+Firewall?
I would think so.
Is there benefit of going SSD besides perhaps boot up time?
Mainly just if you're doing Squid or anything that's going to write to the drive a lot. Otherwise, it's functionally similar to a CF card (other than the translation from SATA to PATA for the CF card, unless it's an onboard CF slot, and/or onboard PATA.) Really, a CF card is just a SSD in a different format; basically a predecessor to modern SSD's. For the most part, you probably could do Squid or other frequently writing package to a sufficiently large CF card. Depending on the wear leveling capabilities it might be fine, especially for something like a 32GB card, but at that point, you're not benefiting from any cost savings.
Now, if you're looking at the benefit of an SSD over a spinning disk, aside from the obvious access time differences, spinning drives fail. Not that SSD's don't, but if you're not writing to an SSD that much, they can last damn near forever. I had a 64MB card in my m0n0wall box for 7 some odd years, it's still fine. Oh, and it wasn't a new card to begin with, it was already a few years old, probably 4 or 5. A spinning drive doesn't particularly care how much you read/write to it, as long as it's spinning it's wearing itself out. If you're not writing to the drives you could set ataidle (is that enabled by default now?) and hope they don't continually cycle between spin up and down.
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Intel NUC
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,56452.0.htmlI've looked at this a bit, but seems a bit too "cutting edge" for my purposes right now. I'd like most of it to just work :)
All four connections to it are Gb Ethernet, and I have two 50Mbit WAN connections coming into it. The LAN connections are Gbit. Real quiet and it might be energy efficient. ;D
Thanks for your feedback. What is the total amount of bandwidth you're pushing through this thing?
PfSense does not include either web filtering or spam blocking by default. Both these are possible by adding packages. The spam blocking package is relatively new though, I've not tried it.
Thanks for pointing that out. I don't currently use the spam or web filtering features of the Snapgear, so this is a non-issue for me.
Mainly just if you're doing Squid or anything that's going to write to the drive a lot. Otherwise, it's functionally similar to a CF card (other than the translation from SATA to PATA for the CF card, unless it's an onboard CF slot, and/or onboard PATA.) Really, a CF card is just a SSD in a different format; basically a predecessor to modern SSD's. For the most part, you probably could do Squid or other frequently writing package to a sufficiently large CF card. Depending on the wear leveling capabilities it might be fine, especially for something like a 32GB card, but at that point, you're not benefiting from any cost savings.
Now, if you're looking at the benefit of an SSD over a spinning disk, aside from the obvious access time differences, spinning drives fail. Not that SSD's don't, but if you're not writing to an SSD that much, they can last damn near forever. I had a 64MB card in my m0n0wall box for 7 some odd years, it's still fine. Oh, and it wasn't a new card to begin with, it was already a few years old, probably 4 or 5. A spinning drive doesn't particularly care how much you read/write to it, as long as it's spinning it's wearing itself out. If you're not writing to the drives you could set ataidle (is that enabled by default now?) and hope they don't continually cycle between spin up and down.
I don't think I'll be using Squid. Good point on the "spinning drives fail" portion. I'd feel much better with a SSD due to that and that alone.
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All four connections to it are Gb Ethernet, and I have two 50Mbit WAN connections coming into it. The LAN connections are Gbit. Real quiet and it might be energy efficient. ;D
Thanks for your feedback. What is the total amount of bandwidth you're pushing through this thing?
I have 1Gb going to each LAN (10.0.1.x/24, 10.0.2.x/24), and that sees a decent amount of activity. I have two 24-port switches connected to each LAN port.
On the WANs I'll peak out at 55Mbit each down. I only get 8Mbit up on each, so those two aren't as busy as the LANs. The ISP claims the lines are 50/8.
The Q77 chipset on the motherboard provides a PCI 2.0 x1 controller for the Ethernet ports. Each Gb ethernet port has it's own PCIe 2.0 x1 lane to the PCH, and of course the PCIe Gbit boards also have a dedicated x1 and x4 lane (depending on the slot it's in, and each board is only an x1 interface). I think it has a total of 8 x PCIe 2.0 lanes.
Because I'm not using a newer CPU, I don't get PCIe 3.0 from the subsystems. And honestly I wouldn't have any use for it. However, if you wanted to use a PCIe 3.0 x16 multiport board with this motherboard, you'd want to get an Ivy Bridge i3 to take advantage of that technology, but a 4-port Gbit E card should do well in a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot.
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After reading this thread I've had some second thoughts about a SSD? There seems to be a lot of debate. Should I go for a CF instead?
Anyway, I'm close to setting on a build. Here are a couple options:
Option 1 - with SSD:
$96 Intel D2500CCE Mini-ITX $24 G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Desktop Memory Model F3-8500CL7S-4GBRL $69 M350 enclosure with picoPSU-80 and 60W adapter $59 Corsair Nova Series 2 CSSD-V30GB2A 2.5" 30GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)Option 2 - with CF:
$96 Intel D2500CCE Mini-ITX $24 G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Desktop Memory Model F3-8500CL7S-4GBRL $69 M350 enclosure with picoPSU-80 and 60W adapter $16 SYBA SD-ADA50024 2.5" SATA/USB To Compact Flash Adapter $24 Transcend 16GB Compact Flash (CF) Flash Card Model TS16GCF133Any thoughts?
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There's a lot of misinformation in that thread. IMHO. ::)
There were a lot of early failures with the Kingston S100 8GB SSD that seemed popular with pfSense users. This was due to bad firmware causing data corruption but was interpreted by many as SSD failure. This is not representative of SSDs in general which should be good for many years.
If you use a CF card you should use the NanoBSD image (because a CF card will be damaged by excessive writes) and there is no point using a card bigger than 2GB at this point. There are some packages you can't use and some that are restricted. You can run Squid for example but only as a filter with no cache.Steve
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There's a lot of misinformation in that thread. IMHO. ::)
There were a lot of early failures with the Kingston S100 8GB SSD that seemed popular with pfSense users. This was due to bad firmware causing data corruption but was interpreted by many as SSD failure. This is not representative of SSDs in general which should be good for many years.
If you use a CF card you should use the NanoBSD image (because a CF card will be damaged by excessive writes) and there is no point using a card bigger than 2GB at this point. There are some packages you can't use and some that are restricted. You can run Squid for example but only as a filter with no cache.Steve
Exactly, and some OCZ drives gave a lot of people… frustration. It's not so much of an issue at this point. Also, you're going to hear the horror stories much louder than the perfectly reliable instances.
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I run the full install on $5 4GB USB flash drive, a keep a duplicate on hand for when it fails.
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I run the full install on $5 4GB USB flash drive, a keep a duplicate on hand for when it fails.
Which may be OK if you run in such a state that there's not a lot of writes to "disk". Some people do, at which point a USB stick will not only wear out fairly quickly, but it also may be counter-productive to run it on something that may have less than optimal read/write performance.
I run mine off a 2GB USB flash drive as well, although the nano install.
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Good, I got the impression that some of the information in that thread may have been blown out of proportion or just plain FUD.
I think at this point I've pretty much settled on "Option 1" above. I don't plan on having much disk I/O so unless I get faulty parts, it should be solid for quite some time.
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Good, I got the impression that some of the information in that thread may have been blown out of proportion or just plain FUD.
I think at this point I've pretty much settled on "Option 1" above. I don't plan on having much disk I/O so unless I get faulty parts, it should be solid for quite some time.
Yes, a modern 30GB SSD should last a long time on a standard pfSense install. That's an early SandForce drive, which should be fine. I would, however, make sure to update the firmware before you start. If I recall correctly, that era of SandForce reserved some space for wear leveling and helped with performance, which is good (more recent versions are releasing that space back to the user for more capacity, since you don't exactly need that much space for your purpose, that extra wear leveling slack can help with longevity, faster is a side bonus.)
