USB or SATA SSD Installation?

[jlpellet]

I'm getting ready to build a new server and have the option to install to a USB 8GB flash drive or to a 80GB SATA SSD. Are there advantages to the SATA SSD install, given that the server will be running 24x7 with rare exceptions? One item I thought of is swap file size/location but not sure what the install does by default & whether the SSD would have an advantage.

Any opinions are appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[ben]

None whatsoever. The OS runs from RAM, rarely touching the OS disk at all. It will only use 2GB of space (and only 1GB of that for the active slice), any additional space is wasted.

 

[jlpellet]

Thanks for the reply. In looking at my current FreeNAS 83b2 install, it reports a swap file of 12GB. Since the only volume on the system that large is the ZFS pool I use for data storage, I'm assuming that the swap file is on the same volume. I wondered if, through use of a separate SSD for the install, not in the data pool, if I could establish the swap file on the SSD, reducing any chance for swap competition with data moves. I'd expect very little benefit, if any, since I never see any swap usage. Thanks again.

 

[warri]

Yes, FreeNAS creates swap partitions on each hard drive of a zfs pool. But depending how much RAM you use, swap might not get used at all.
Instead you could attach the SSD as cache drive to your pool. Though I'm not sure how much of a performance boost you will notice, only seems to make a difference if you have some files which get accessed frequently by multiple users at the same time.