Am I leaving performance on the table by using SATA2 SSDs for my OS drive?

[arckalocal]

I'm planning on mirroring the OS drive over two SSDs. I have two old 160GB X25-M SSDs (SATA2) laying around that I can use, but I want to know if I'll see a performance hit versus using two SATA3 drives like the Intel S3500s? I don't mind spending the money, but if I don't have to that's cool too.

 

[diedrichg]

No, the OS gets loaded into RAM on startup.

 

[sretalla]

No, the OS gets loaded into RAM on startup.

If that's a reference to the way that FreeNAS used to run by loading into a RAM disk, it hasn't been like that for a long time, but there's no real performance hit from running on a "slow" boot pool as indeed most modules used to run are loaded into RAM by modern OS.

 

[jgreco]

I'm planning on mirroring the OS drive over two SSDs. I have two old 160GB X25-M SSDs (SATA2) laying around that I can use, but I want to know if I'll see a performance hit versus using two SATA3 drives like the Intel S3500s? I don't mind spending the money, but if I don't have to that's cool too.

You don't have to spend the money and in fact it would be dumb (at least IMO). X25's would be awesome.

 

[firesyde424]

We've booted more than a petabyte of FreeNAS boxes over the years from simple internal USB 2.0 thumb drives or mirrored SD cards. When we did eventually switch those systems to boot from SATA SSDs, we did not notice any difference in performance either way.

 

[arckalocal]

Thank you for your responses, everyone. I'll be using the SSDs I have, its nice to be able to upcycle these drives that I've had for 10-ish years.