Mirroring boot drives in J4125 firewall box

[arcadeperfect]

I'm looking to use one of these for pfsense.

It has one msata port and one regular sata port. It only has one power port for sata (not a standard one - it comes with a cable to adapt to the drive).

- For dual boot drive do the SSD's need to be identical, or can I use 2 similarly specced ones in the 2 separate form factors?

- Alternatively I could use an msata to sata adapter and use 2 identical drives but I'd need to make a custom splitter and power them both from the same power port.

- Or just go for USB drives?

Thanks

 

[sko]

- just use a single disk and call it a day


with the amount of writes a firewall creates the SSD will be by far the last thing that dies...
If you want redundancy, just use 2 systems in fallback configuration with CARP and pfsync.

 

[oneplane]

One disk is plenty. The only thing you need to keep track of is your config file. OPNsense (and maybe pfsense too) can sync this file to a cloud storage of your choice, and to additional local media. If the disk were to die, automatic restoration using an existing config file will be all you need to get back up and running.

If you think the downtime of a bad disk is too much for you, also consider that the entire PC might die and no amount of disk will help you with that; you'd need a second PC.

 

[arcadeperfect]

I mean ... any form of redundancy is vulnerable to some other dependency dying. It just seemed like a cheap redundancy to add so might as well. But fair enough.

 

[oneplane]

I mean ... any form of redundancy is vulnerable to some other dependency dying. It just seemed like a cheap redundancy to add so might as well. But fair enough.

There is some slight middle ground: you could keep a 2nd drive 'installed' and ready to go. All you'd need to do to 'fail over' is copy the config file and change the boot order.

A more different but same option is ZFS mirroring. You'd even be able to have disk 1 and disk 2 both as boot options since they would both be seen as 'individual' systems by the UEFI boot manager. I don't know if pfSense can do that, but OPNSense can.

 

[arcadeperfect]

righto thanks for the tips!