Impact of speed for system disk / dongle

[gregober]

Hello,

I am trying to find out what is the best option to install a 12To RAID system with 32G or RAM.
The system offers couple of different interfaces, It'll be based on an Intel S2600GL board.

I can install this on :

1. A USB dongle with a R/W speed of : 19/17 MB/s
   
2. A SATAII Dongle with a R/W speed of : 125/120 MB/s

My main question is : is there any impact on the system if I choose a fast device to host the system (since the system is loaded in memory, this should have no impact??) ?

Or considering the fact that both devices are as reliable, should I go for the cheapest one ?


Thanks for your reply.

G.B.

 

[jgreco]

Go for the one you trust more. The only thing you don't really want is something that's slow like USB 1, where it just takes fooooorrreeeeevvvvveeeeerrrrrrr to do any dumb operation like database updating. We've seen failures of USB keys (a bit of an annoyingly high failure rate actually) but there's no guarantee that anything else is inherently more reliable. For FreeNAS's purposes, USB 2 is reasonably fast and SATA speeds are very nice.

 

[praecorloth]

You're talking about just where to actually install FreeNAS to? I would recommend USB, and save your SATA ports for disks. After booting, there shouldn't be a whole lot of R/W action happening on the FreeNAS drive. All of my FreeNAS installs (both personal and professional) have FreeNAS installed to a USB thumb drive.

 

[aidasan]

I have also install freenas on an USB drive for configuration. It takes long time to boot and each change need to be save (But its so slow).
I don't like the USB solution but for testing its not bad.
Don't forget to save your configuration ;)

 

[JaimieV]

Sounds like your USB thumb is working in USB1 mode, aidasan. I've never had any issues with slowness with mine, even with a USB stick that my Xbox360 rejects as being too slow to save games on!

 

[jgreco]

I see USB 2 as a bit slow too. We used to USB 1 systems ..... very very slow. USB 2 is definitely faster. Currently we're booting FreeNAS systems off of ESXi datastore (RAID1 SSD) for about the fastest possible configuration; it is easy to see that this is about as much faster than USB 2 as USB 2 was over USB 1.

The main thing is that when you're working with a USB 2 based FreeNAS system, it's slow but you never quite get to the point of "that should have finished ten seconds ago."

Until, that is, you've worked with a FreeNAS system where everything's on SSD and then all the little pauses become a lot more noticeable.

So now anytime I have to mess with our N36L it "feels" slow.

 

[cyberjock]

jgreco is right. The GUI really operates MUCH faster from a SATA disk. But at the same time how often do you really expect to be logging into the GUI and changing stuff? For me, aside from upgrading I really never log into the GUI. So for me using a USB key works perfectly. Free up one SATA port and lower power to boot.

If you truly expect to be logging into the GUI several times a day and always making setting changes(I'm not sure what you'd actually be doing daily...) and time=money then yeah, a SATA drive might be better.