How RAID 0 SSD on Pfsense

pixfour

Hello,

I been trying to figure out how to do a raid 0 on our pfsense server for a couple of days already but I can't find it on any forum. We are planning to use pfsense as cache server that's why we need to Install it to a raid 0 configuration for faster data transfer. I hope anyone could help me figure out this concern.

Thank You.

Derelict

If you really want to use RAID 0 I believe your only choice is to use a compatible RAID controller that presents its striped disks to pfSense as one disk.

There is no built-in facility in pfSense for striping disks.

2.3.4_1: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.3R/hardware.html

2.4.0: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.1R/hardware.html

Grimson

@Derelict:

There is no built-in facility in pfSense for striping disks.

Not even with ZFS in 2.4?

doktornotor

There is no such thing supported anywhere. And look, the cache performance gain you'll see from SSDs in RAID-0 is just in your imagination. Are you on 10Gbit LAN serving thousands of clients or what?

tirsojrp

1 - A modern 2xSSD Raid0 on SATA3 ports would need 10gbit to be saturated. Asuming 500+MB/s disks. A single NVMe disk would beat it easily.

2 - Web caching is not that effective right now as nearly everything is encrypted and dynamic. That means a lot of stuff to configure to get it done.

kpa

On vanilla FreeBSD there is gstripe but that seems to be disabled on pfSense. I doubt that it would give you what you want anyway.

Don't do it. A single SSD can saturate practically all network links. Mostly because even with 10GbE you'll still have on-disk compression, caches in RAM and the possibility of using ZFS and having two disks in a pool to increase IO.