SSD for FreeBSD NAS device

[Shane Ambler]

On 20/11/2012 20:54, bsd wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have just acquired an Intel R2312GZ4GC4 which I have equipped with
> a Adaptec RAID 51245 and 6 WD red disks of 3To - It'll come with
> 32Gb of Kingston ECC RAM.
>
> I am planing to use It as a backup device on a second hosting
> facility to backup couple of critical servers of mine.

> Do you think I should go for a redundant SSD drives (RAID 1) or does
> this offers limited interest in such config ?

The advantage of SSD drives is their speed, in a ZFS config they can
help most in two ways, as cache devices to speed up disk access or as
log devices to increase reliability.

Personally for a backup server I would use the two SSD drives as a
mirrored log device for the ZFS pool. Reliability over performance.

Having said that if you haven't got them I wouldn't get them. For a busy
fileserver in the office you want the extra performance. As an offsite
backup server the time saved in performance is only going to impact a
few times a day and will be outweighed by the network speed. The cost of
the SSD drives could add more drives to increase space or redundancy -
RAIDZ3 ?