Does pfSense support multiple drives?

[dscline]

I'm finally getting ready to dive into a pfSense router to replace my current (home) wireless router, to get some additional functionality/flexibility.  The "spare" hardware I have for it is overkill for just pfSense, so I've decided to install it as a VM on vsphere 5, to give me the flexibility to use the hardware for other purposes if I ever need to (and also just to get a little familiar with virtualization).  My hardware setup is a little unusual:  I'm limited to 2.5" drives.  I have a couple of SSDs + a laptop hard drive.  I really don't like the idea of my internet router being dependent on a mechanical drive.  I'd much prefer solid state.  But I've also read some cautions about using the CF version for SSDs to prevent excessive writes from wearing them out (considering that reliability is the whole point of using SSD).  But from what I understand, there are some drawbacks to the CF install, one of them being lack of packages.

So my question is:  is it possible to install pfSense to an SSD, but then route just certain functions (such as logging, squid, anything else write-intensive) to another drive?  If the answer is yes, and I manage to limit relatively static data to the SSD (so it should last nearly forever), and more dynamic data to a spinning disk, what happens to pfSense if the (mechanical) drive dies, and it can't log, squid "breaks", etc.?  If the answer is "something bad", is a possible solution having a CF installation running in another VM, then doing failover to it if the full installation breaks?

Thanks in advance for patience with my green questions!

[jimp]

While we don't technically support that in the GUI, the underlying OS is perfectly capable of doing that. It can take a little hacking to make it work, but it can be done.