SSD vs SAS Raid Setup?
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Hi all -
I have an HP Proliant DL360 G7 I currently use for pfSense. I just upgraded the RAM and it got me thinking about the hdds. I currently have 4x15k 74gb SAS drives in a raid 5 array that pfSense is installed on. Is there any real benefit to moving the OS to an SSD drive? My gut says probably no real improvement. It wanted to get your thoughts though.
Thanks!
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it doesn't really matter in 99% of the cases.
If you want to run a huge proxy cache, the SSD's might offer a bit of an performance improvement.
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it doesn't really matter in 99% of the cases.
If you want to run a huge proxy cache, the SSD's might offer a bit of an performance improvement.
Thanks, that's what I figured. Not worth the extra money and headache.
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The ssd will be way more power efficient. Running a dl360 g7 you probably don't care. If you were building a new system you'd be nuts to configure it the same way. Running the current system into the ground, there's no reason to touch it.
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Is there any real benefit to moving the OS to an SSD drive?
None at all. That kind of array is far overkill for pfSense. An SSD (or two) might make a slight difference in boot time, but given my experience with the dl360 (I have g5, g6, and g7) the POST time is by far longer than the boot time. As others have said, maybe with a squid cache, but even then I expect you'd be hard pressed to see the difference. I'd take your redundant array over a single SSD in production any day. If you really want more performance with your current hardware, back up the config, blank the array, reconfigure in RAID 10, reinstall pfSense, and restore the config.
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Thanks again all. I'm not worried about power and I'm not that interested in gaining a little performance increase. Faster boot time, to your point, isn't a big gain with these servers given how long they take to post. I just got to thinking and wanted to get some other folks' thoughts. I'll keep the current setup!
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SSD will have a performance edge and have a clear power saving but i/o performance is not important for pfSense.
The SAS setup you have however gives you important redundancy.
So its a choice between power usage, noise of device vs redundancy.
Of course you could keep redundancy by doing something like a ssd mirror setup on zfs. So you get the best of everything.