Hard drive for Firewall or Fileserver OS?

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black0ut

Gawd
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Aug 5, 2008
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I've got to replace a pfsense hard drive, as well as an unraid on slackware fileserver hard drive. I don't mind buying a 640gb hard drive for the OS, it's just that the thought of all that space being wasted really bugs me. I don't want to use an old, smaller drive because it has a higher chance to fail.

What do you guys do when faced with this problem?
 
For my PFSense box, I use an old IBM T40 Thinkpad laptop. It's old, a Pentium M 1.2.
I had piles and piles of old T20 and T40 vintange Thinkpads from clients replacing them, before tossing them out I snagged a few hard drives. Out of those old hard drives, I have a few which run quietly and nicely.

Since PFSense doesn't push a hard drive much, I'm not worried about it failing for my home setup. It rarely reboots..that's when the drive is under load...I might reboot it once a year for some update or major traffic shaper change. If the drive fails...I'll snag another drive out of my pile of used spares, and have a new install up and running in under 30 minutes.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
For my PFSense box, I use an old IBM T40 Thinkpad laptop. It's old, a Pentium M 1.2.
I had piles and piles of old T20 and T40 vintange Thinkpads from clients replacing them, before tossing them out I snagged a few hard drives. Out of those old hard drives, I have a few which run quietly and nicely.

Since PFSense doesn't push a hard drive much, I'm not worried about it failing for my home setup. It rarely reboots..that's when the drive is under load...I might reboot it once a year for some update or major traffic shaper change. If the drive fails...I'll snag another drive out of my pile of used spares, and have a new install up and running in under 30 minutes.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I used some hard drives pulled from old dells, but they all died within 8 months. Must be the heat or something.

I guess it's just a pain to have to reinstall (especially for pfsense, internet is internet lol)
 
Depending on how much space it actually needs, how much it's writing, and the capabilities of the hardware and software, you may be able to use a USB key or a CompactFlash-to-IDE/SATA adapter.

I've got my FreeNAS running off a MicroSD card in a tiny USB adapter. Note that there's a removable plastic cover on the adapter which adds quite a bit of size to it. I'm also using one of these setups in my head unit's USB port for music in my car.
 
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InvisiBill said:
Depending on how much space it actually needs, how much it's writing, and the capabilities of the hardware and software, you may be able to use a USB key or a CompactFlash-to-IDE/SATA adapter.

I've got my FreeNAS running off a MicroSD card in a tiny USB adapter. Note that there's a removable plastic cover on the adapter which adds quite a bit of size to it. I'm also using one of these setups in my head unit's USB port for music in my car.
Click to expand...


^ What he said. I've been running my Pf Sense box for 3 years now on a generic consumer-grade Sandisk 1gb CF card through an CF-Laptop IDE convertor. Works like a champ, and boots faster as the 20gb drive it replaced also.

Depending on your motherboard/bios, booting/running from a USB key is a very valid possibility as well. However, unless the bios recognizes it as a HDD on boot, getting PFSense to install on it will be challenging.
 
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I use DOMs for this. Little industrial flash modules that plug directly into an IDE port. They work great, are inexpensive, and give a little more peace of mind than using a random flash card where you have no idea if the wear leveling can handle it or not - they are designed for this. I use the InnoDisk EDC4000 and EDC8000 modules, I've got a half dozen or so in production pfSense boxes starting about 18 months ago and have been very happy with them. I buy them here: http://www.memorydepot.com/ssd/diskonmodule40.asp. The EDC4000 is quite significantly slower, but available in smaller sizes and a little less expensive.

CF->IDE adapters are a good choice as well, again as long as you use good flash. CF cards have a native IDE interface so you'll get full performance and it's literally a completely passive adapter so no parts to fail and dirt cheap.

For pfSense and FreeNAS, at least, you can also boot directly from the LiveCD and just store your configuration file on a USB stick which will be autoloaded. Sometimes the WebUI responds a bit slowly as it spins up the CD drive, but for actual usage performance is not affected since everything runs out of RAM anyway.
 
keenan said:
I use DOMs for this. Little industrial flash modules that plug directly into an IDE port. They work great, are inexpensive, and give a little more peace of mind than using a random flash card where you have no idea if the wear leveling can handle it or not - they are designed for this. I use the InnoDisk EDC4000 and EDC8000 modules, I've got a half dozen or so in production pfSense boxes starting about 18 months ago and have been very happy with them. I buy them here: http://www.memorydepot.com/ssd/diskonmodule40.asp. The EDC4000 is quite significantly slower, but available in smaller sizes and a little less expensive.

CF->IDE adapters are a good choice as well, again as long as you use good flash. CF cards have a native IDE interface so you'll get full performance and it's literally a completely passive adapter so no parts to fail and dirt cheap.

For pfSense and FreeNAS, at least, you can also boot directly from the LiveCD and just store your configuration file on a USB stick which will be autoloaded. Sometimes the WebUI responds a bit slowly as it spins up the CD drive, but for actual usage performance is not affected since everything runs out of RAM anyway.
Click to expand...

Wow 2million r/w ? That sounds like a ton, definitely surpasses normal flash and SSD even.. and it's pretty cheap at small sizes. Gonna look into this a bit more.
 
I tend to use old laptop drives, or USB keys for my servers that don't require much OS disk access.
 
keenan said:
I use DOMs for this. Little industrial flash modules that plug directly into an IDE port. They work great, are inexpensive, and give a little more peace of mind than using a random flash card where you have no idea if the wear leveling can handle it or not - they are designed for this. I use the InnoDisk EDC4000 and EDC8000 modules, I've got a half dozen or so in production pfSense boxes starting about 18 months ago and have been very happy with them. I buy them here: http://www.memorydepot.com/ssd/diskonmodule40.asp. The EDC4000 is quite significantly slower, but available in smaller sizes and a little less expensive.

CF->IDE adapters are a good choice as well, again as long as you use good flash. CF cards have a native IDE interface so you'll get full performance and it's literally a completely passive adapter so no parts to fail and dirt cheap.

For pfSense and FreeNAS, at least, you can also boot directly from the LiveCD and just store your configuration file on a USB stick which will be autoloaded. Sometimes the WebUI responds a bit slowly as it spins up the CD drive, but for actual usage performance is not affected since everything runs out of RAM anyway.
Click to expand...

My 1 or 2GB MicroSD plus adapter was under $10 shipped, if USB works for your particular situation (it's great for holding the FreeNAS config and the embedded install, since it doesn't do much writing). Though I might have to try out one of the USB DOMs just for the heck of it.
 
InvisiBill said:
My 1 or 2GB MicroSD plus adapter was under $10 shipped, if USB works for your particular situation (it's great for holding the FreeNAS config and the embedded install, since it doesn't do much writing). Though I might have to try out one of the USB DOMs just for the heck of it.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the new NanoBSD stuff is very compelling too. Almost no reason for a full install anymore unless you want a Squid cache or something. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but if it means I can get all the functionality and reliability I need out of a $2 CF->IDE adapter and $10 2GB CF card instead of the $35 DOM, I just made myself another $30 for every one of these I install. Woot.

Plus then I can just keep a spare CF card laying around with a pfSense image on it and get a client back up and running in minutes instead of quarter-hours if something goes sideways with their install. Nice.
 
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