MSATA – standard pfSense or embedded?

jasonlitka

Jason, check your /var/log/dmesg.boot for the errors if they exist.

They do not.

Installed pfsense i386 full on the mSATA intel ssd. The messages aren't there anymore. I'd like to note that the only reason I am even running full on an "embedded device" is because I am using an SLC-based mSATA board which according to many, can withstand a lot of writes.

That is true, SLC flash is designed for write-heavy applications. The 311 is used for read/write caching of your Windows boot drive with the Z68 chipset and the X25-E is the "value" choice for the ZIL for ZFS file servers.

@wm408:

I did have a small problem on boot. Because I built the drive on another system that had other drives, the device that was placed in /etc/fstab was something like: /dev/da0s1a and I had to change it to /dev/ad4s1a.

first I was in some kind of boot error prompt and typed: ufs:/dev/ad4s1a (just to get it to boot)
then I edited /etc/fstab to reflect the changed disk device.

That is to be expected when doing an install on one machine and then moving the drive to another (which is why I warned you earlier).

Good luck with your full install on the Soekris. I finally added Squid to mine the other day. I'm running with a 512MB RAM cache for objects up to 64KB and a 4GB "disk" cache for objects up to 1MB. Now all I need to do is to figure out how to get some statistics on hit rate, saved bandwidth, etc.

jimp

I know this is a really old thread but it's coming up high in search results for the problem so I thought a follow-up was in order.

Seems the errors on NanoBSD with the net6501 on an mSATA are due to it needing DMA and/or write caching enabled.

I wrote up the solution here:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Boot_Troubleshooting#NanoBSD_on_Newer_Hardware