Adding RAID long after original install - custom install partition sizes or factory defaults
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I am ready to go ahead with a new install of 24.11 onto a RAID array. The SSD's are (3) 240 Gb Kingston hard drives and the memory is 16226 MiB with 14% currently being used.
The current setup is a single Kingston 110 with 9.40G allocated and 101G free.
I started out assuming, "just use the factory defaults for partition sizes." However since this is a new install what might be the best sizes of partitions starting fresh.
let me know, thank you.
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I would still just use the default sizes. And I'd probably just use two drives in a zfs mirror.
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@stephenw10 I have to say your suggestion is wrecking my plan! But everything you have helped with previously proved reliable.
Would you please, in your understanding why only mirroring with two drives, instead of my three would be best. I tend to like the concept of swapping without shutting down... however how often would I not shut down pfsense to work on the hardware. I also like more redundancy than less - amateur for sure. I mean how bad can it be, "more is better!"
It seems a great deal of disk space is unused because of the efficiency of pfsense. Are there ways to utilize the underutilized space?
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If you have hot-swappable hardware raid then that might be an option. But if you want that level of resilience then you should have an HA pair anyway.
The issue with hardware raid is it often requires additional drivers and can make reinstalling significantly more complex if you need to.
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@stephenw10 Ahhh, so I have a misconception. No, I have no hardware RAID, I assumed my experience with TrueNAS was similar to RAID in FreeBSD - in it was software driven and provided hot swappable capabilities. If this is true - it does not - then yes one of my reasons for RAID with three drives is out the window. Please clarify "HA pair?"
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Most SSDs / drive controllers are not hot-swappable so you need to power down the system to change it out.
A High Availability pair of pfSense installs means two separate hardware devices that can both pass the traffic. This means that in the event of a hardware failure traffic still passes. It also means you can power off one node to swap out a drive and traffic still passes.
See: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/highavailability/index.html -
@stephenw10 Ah, yeah, no. My wife likes her HULU and Amazon but not that much!
Back to mirroring... if there is an SSD failure, pfsense will continue to function till I shut down pull the failed drive and reinstall new. Then the RAID will be rebuilt across the new drive. However if both drives fail it is a reinstall plus a config file - just like if my current single drive fails.
So the redundancy is in the odds of both SSD's failing simultaneously.
Suddenly... I realized right now I have no plan for recovery if my single SSD failed. I need to archive the current image from netgate I have for installing pfsense via memory stick!
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Well IMO the odds of two SSDs failing at the same time are far lower than some other hardware component failing taking out the firewall. But, sure, the odds of 3 SSDs failing are even lower.
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@stephenw10 Well you are a disrupter (Which is good... in this case.) I could move the 2 110 GB SSDs from my NAS into the pfsense box and move the larger SSDs which I purchased into the NAs making a more efficient use of the GBs.
