raidz zpool. What to do with spare SSD?

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fanix

Dabbler
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Oct 10, 2013
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Hi,

I'm new to FreeNAS, and despite my efforts to find the answer, I still have mixed information.

I've got FreeNAS 9.1.1 running of a 4GB USB. Then x3 1TB drives in a zpool raidz setup. Leaving me with 2TB space. Transfer rate to and from the server is great, getting max speed for my 1Gbps network.

I have a spare SSD drive, 60GB, and was wondering if I could put it to some use in my FreeNAS, as a cache device or log. But apparently you cannot use cache or log in a raidz config? Is this true? If so, what else can I use to SSD for to improve my NAS setup?

Thanks, any advise is much appreciated.
 

fanix

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 10, 2013
Messages
20
Okay, I went through this powerpoint presentation:

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/slideshow-explaining-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Learned a lot. SSD will not provide me any use with my current configuration. I might as well just create a stripped VDEV with the SSD, and add that to a new zpool, which I'll use for jail systems, and whatever other extra files I wish to store.

Since FreeNAS on a USB stick is read-only, would it be possible to partition the SSD, and then install FreeNAS onto it, resulting in faster booting and it being read/write, and then use the other partition, create a vdev out of it, and then create a new zpool with it?
 

joeschmuck

Old Man
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May 28, 2011
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So it's good you read into this topic a bit and realized a SSD for a home system generally will not yield any additional positive results.

Depending on how you manage your hard drives you could use the SSD for jails which could benefit you. If you sleep your hard drives, having a SSD with your jails should benefit you but I haven't personally tried this with FreeNAS 9.1.1. I know it would benefit you in 8.3.x. Just create a new pool and store the jails there. Also you could share the bulk of that space for things you share frequently to reduce the spinning up of the hard drives.

As for the boot partitions, you can either use the SSD as a boot drive or something else but not dual purpose. This is because the current boot drive partition tables are set up using all four partitions so there isn't one left over with to play with. Many of us have expressed concern with this but it has yet to be addressed. Hopefully it will be adjusted in the future. The reason it's done this way is so you can revert to a previous version if you did the GUI update. So it's a feature right now.
 
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