New nas multiple purposes

[jgreco]

Appropriate SLOG devices are entirely dependent on your use case. First off, do you even need one? It's just a good question to ask, because so often a home lab setup or something like that probably just doesn't really need it, and the performance hit associated with it.

Assuming you need (or really want) one, the cheap end of the fast stuff is probably the Intel 750, whereas the other Intel NVMe DC series units are also very good, but substantially more expensive.

For SATA based SSD's, the pickin's are more slim these days. The obvious easy choices used to be the Intel 3xx (320, 335) units but consumer grade units seem to be dropping the power loss protection. But the upside is that enterprise SSD prices have dropped too, and something like the DC S3500 can be found fairly cheaply these days. Looks like an 80GB unit is sub-$100 which offers 45TBW. Ehhhh. I hope it's obvious that these will be slower than a NVMe drive.

 

[Spearfoot]

The Intel DC S3700 SSD is a pretty good "poor man's SLOG device". It has low latency and good write endurance. The S3500 @jgreco mentioned is a good choice as well, though it's designed more for read performance. Really good SLOG devices are pricey; something like the Intel DC P3700 will run several hundred dollars; top-end NVRAM devices cost crazy money.

For a lab system -- and you really shouldn't be running FreeNAS-on-VMware in any other environment! -- you can simply disable synchronous writes on your NFS/iSCSI datasets. I did this for nearly a year... but I recently added an S3700 SLOG and re-enabled synchronous writes; I don't really like living on the edge. Without one or the other of these two alternatives, your FreeNAS datastore performance will be abysmal.

You can find new 100GB S3700s on ebay for a little over $100:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/161879939836?_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT

 

[jgreco]

Oh, good catch, I don't really keep up on the best deals because it varies and changes so quickly.

 

[Dsky07]

Can you guys recommend any usb card I can use to passthrough a usb sound card? Turns out my xbox cannot play sound from the virtualized windows 7 without :(

 

[jgreco]

You need it to work with Windows? I'd seriously try just about any crappy old USB-to-sound adapter currently available that advertises Windows 10 compatibility.

 

[Dsky07]

You need it to work with Windows? I'd seriously try just about any crappy old USB-to-sound adapter currently available that advertises Windows 10 compatibility.

Yeah I figured something like that. Any good pcie USB card you guys can recommend that will work so I can passthrough USB to the VM?

 

[jgreco]

I seriously doubt anyone else has tried...

 

[Ericloewe]

Doesn't Virtualbox on FreeBSD support passing through USB devices to the guest? To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't, it's rather hacky on Windows...

 

[jgreco]

Doesn't Virtualbox on FreeBSD support passing through USB devices to the guest?

Welcome to the conversation. Obviously this is assumed to be possible within the context of this thread.

 

[Dsky07]

Thanks. I got a S3700 200gb for $100 on eBay. Hope it works out and I can re-enable sync.