Which SSDs for OpenIndiana mirrored boot drives?

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M

mixer

Member
Nov 26, 2011
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0
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If I go ahead with my plans to drop the ESXi out of my hypervisor system ( http://forums.servethehome.com/showthread.php?1262 ) I'll need a new boot drive for my OI system hosting some KVMs. Just for the boot drives -- 60GB/64GB should be more than enough (and 32 aren't enough cheaper to bother with).

Should I use identical drives for the mirror, or hedge my bets in the reliability department and get two different brands or even controllers?

Contenders seem to be:

Plextor M3 --£53
Kingston SSDNow V300 --£54
Corsair Nova 2 --£55
Crucial M4 --£56
Intel 330 --£57
Intel 520 --£67


Plextor and Intel 520 have 5 year warranties, the rest 3.

I'm leaning toward Plextor, Crucial, or Intel 330. The motherboard is Supermicro X9 SCA-F. Speed is not really a factor, compatibility and reliability are paramount.

What do you think about mix and match for the ZFS rpool mirror? And if I did that could I use a 60GB mirrored with 64 GB?

Thanks!
 
S

sotech

Member
Jul 13, 2011
305
1
18
Australia
We have a couple of systems running OI+mirrored boot drives using 64GB Crucial M4s that have been going for >12 months without a single issue. We see extremely low failure rates on M4s and 520s.

These days I like to hedge my bets and tend to mirror different brands - there have been enough firmware issues across various makes/models that it makes sense - a big firmware bug across both SSDs might mean downtime or an urgent firmware update, whereas on only one drive in the mirror means less chance of downtime and the possibility of being able to fix it at your leisure... depending on the nature of the issue, of course. There doesn't seem to be a noticeable effect on performance. No reason you couldn't mirror a 60GB with a 64GB, you'll just not be able to utilise that extra 4GB.
 
M

mixer

Member
Nov 26, 2011
92
0
6
Thank you for your valuable input, sotech. One Crucial M4 and one Intel 520 would give me one Sandforce controller and one Marvell controller.
 
M

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
1,244
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you can get unused dell 50gb or 100gb SLC (older technology) drives for $1/GB. ebay
 
M

mixer

Member
Nov 26, 2011
92
0
6
The plan is coming together!

Code: 
pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
  scan: resilvered 19.8G in 0h4m with 0 errors on Mon Jan 28 18:35:29 2013
config:

	NAME          STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM     CAP            Product
	rpool         ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-0    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    c4t0d0s0  ONLINE       0     0     0     60 GB          INTEL SSDSC2CW06
	    c4t1d0s0  ONLINE       0     0     0     64 GB          M4-CT064M4SSD2

errors: No known data errors
Thanks again, sotech.
 
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