Using an SSD "disk" for /

[Freddie Cash]

On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 10:39 AM, Tom Evans <tevans.uk at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 1:34 PM, Pete French <petefrench at ticketswitch.com> wrote:
>> I boot a server from a Compact Flash drive connected to a CF->SATA
>> adaptor. Its only 4GB, enough to boot, and then all my read/write
>> partititons come from several terrabytes of attached zpool. It
>> works excellently, and was very cheap to setup. Performance is
>> fine as you are almost never writing to the flash drive. The only
>> time I notice the slowdown is when doing an installworld or installkernel.
>
> When you set up your disks like this, where do you put your swap?
>
> For my home ZFS server - which has a tank with two raidz pools, each
> with 6 disks in - I partitioned the first 6 disks into 2 partitions, a
> 6 GB chunk at the start, and the remaining data used for zfs. I then
> use 3 of the disks first partition in a gmirror UFS root partition,
> and the other 3 as swap.

We do something similar to Pete:
  - 2x CompactFlash disks in CF-to-SATA adapters, gmirror'd together for the OS
  - bunch of SATA disks configured via ZFS, for everything else

But, we add an SSD for L2ARC use, with 8 GB partitioned off for swap.

Thus, the CF disks are basically read-only except for
installworld/kernel and the odd config file update.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com