storage

[fizzgig656]

whats the best use of my drives and flash pens.

Im currently running the os off a 4gb flash pen, and not sure if i should add another flash pen for plugin's? or have a larger pen for both?

Ive got a 4 sata drives 500gb, 2 running off the 3gb/s motherboard, and two off a pci sata card. (will i be better to buy a pci-e mini to support 3gb/s?). should i raidz the 4 drives? will read writes be better moving from pci to pci-e realisticly??)

cheers

 

[joeschmuck]

To answer your questions...

1) Currently the boot flash will only hold the boot code no matter how large a USB flash drive you use. You cannot install plugins to this usb device. In the future I hope to see a configurable image to take advantage of the excess space but that isn't happening right now and may never.

2) If you have an extra flash drive, you could place your plugins on one of those. But, if you run your hard drives all the time (they do not sleep) then you are saving nothing by using the flash drive and actually it lends to a slower loading time of the plugins.

3) Um, not sure what you are asking about for the drives. My opinion is, if the drives are working, leave them alone. If you are asking about adding in a hardware RAID then my advice is no. The ZFS software RAID works great for small office and home use. If you were a larger company or NEEDED high throughput and O/I speeds then there is more research in your future.

Cheers