Building out a router
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The onboard NICs work with 2.1 without modification?
If it's the Giada, then yes, the 82574 will work for sure.
If it's the Gigabyte, then it will work with pfSense 2.1 as long as Gigabyte doesn't switch out the 8111F's for 8111G's (I've seen them do that before on some boards).
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Id avoid an SSD drive. You will kill it in short time.
Just one reference point: techreport.com have been hammering some SSD as part of a series of articles on SSD endurance. All of the six contenders have been hammered with writes for months - with every one of the six (including consumer-grade Samsung 840) beeing alive and kicking after 200TB had been written to them:
http://techreport.com/review/25559/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-200tb-update
200TB equals about 100GB of writes every day for more than 5 years.
Six SSD is, admittedly, a small sample size - but it should dispel the notion that pfSense (necessarily or probably) "will" kill an SSD in short time.
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So far, pfSense has not yet killed any of the SSDs it's running on. "Full" installs, not nanoBSD.
These are 4GB SLC models. SLC might be more robust than MLC.
2GB of the 4GB are used as a swap partition. Yup, I did use the automatic partitioning during the installation. The swap file has never been in use, as the system has never run out of physical RAM (2GB installed), but it can be regarded as a last reserve if ever some process develops a memory leak.
4GB SSD and 2GB RAM may sound like overkill as the system would run as well with a 1GB SSD and 512M RAM, but the free RAM can be used for Squid and the low utilization of the SSD gives it probably more leverage for wear leveling. Plus, if needed (or feeling insane), I can turn on Squid logging.
I am not totally convinced about the usability of Sandisk SSDs in infrastructure appliances. I have zero experience with the proposed model, but I know of issues with other models. Not with the flash durability, but controller issues, with SSDs failing to boot or stalling during operation.
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Thanks to all of you for the good info but i see there is a lot of talk about SSD's so that i want to know is SSD or NOT?
VOTE???
YES SSD
or
NO SSD;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
I have the same mainboard since 4 weeks in action and it works great. Look some threads ago i posted some benchmarks. VPN throughput is great and power consuption is very less. I´m using a M350 mini itx case a 80 watt pico psu and 8 GB corsair voyager GT. No SSD and no HDD.
Cool thanks man and ill look up some of your post..
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Get a larger modern ssd. Amazon has had the Intel 530 series 240GB units for cheap.
If you do run an ssd, just make sure you enable trim manually in pfsense. You can also increase the overprovisioning by reducing the amount of space partitioned out during installation. -
I would no worries fitting an SSD as long it's a recent model. However consider why you are fitting one, what advantages is it going to bring you? The usual advantage of SSDs, they're much faster, is only really relevant if you're going to be running Squid. They also run cooler and consume less power but is that really necessary in your system?
You haven't actually said what situation this box is going into.Steve
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I bought a bunch of 30/40/50gb SSDs used for really cheap. non have died. as long as they arent doa and haven't been abused they are fine you will not write enough logs to destroy them. No reason to really go mechanically. Buy a cheap used SSD
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Just an update to this build… When I was using it for PF it was kicking ass and taking names lol but I have moved to VmWare ESXi an now i'm running PF in a VM...
Thanks for all the info guys. ;)