PfSense box! Is RAID 0 or RAID 1 worth doing? If so, which?

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
1

I am putting together a PfSense router and the the MOBO I am using has 2 SATA-150 ports on it which can be run as RAID-0, RAID-1, or JBOD. Would the added speed of RAID-0 aid this machine's performance? Should I run RAID-1 as a safeguard? Or, should I just use one disc? I don't mind doing regular backups. Mostly leaning toward RAID-0 but would like input about weather the speed increase is worth the extra drive. Thanks, CO

2

I personally would just run it off of a thumb drive if you have the ability. If you're bound and determined to put 2 disks in the machine, RAID-1. With RAID-0 you are:

  • Not likely to see performance benefits with any application (unless you're running 10Gb NICs around your house, then maybe) in pfSense
  • Increase you chances of catastrophic failure by 100%

Not likely to be any upsides, and always with the downsides. RAID-0 is a pile. Same with JBOD.

5 Likes
3

pfsense almost never uses the disks once booted (other than to save logs and configuration changes). even a 10gb connection will probably not have any disk access.
raid 0 not worth it . raid 1 not worth it , unless you need the redundancy for uptime in an enterprise or business setting.
if you want boot speed use a ssd. my setup using a sempron single core processor @ 2.8 GHZ max. dual WAN on a 1gb network:

Platform pfSense
CPU Type AMD Sempron(tm) 145 Processor
Uptime 2 Days 03 Hours 16 Minutes 00 Seconds
Current date/time Wed May 10 8:38:09 +07 2017
DNS server(s)
127.0.0.1
8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4
Last config change Wed May 10 0:00:06 +07 2017
State table size
0% (706/403000) Show states
MBUF Usage
2% (4306/249624)
Load average
0.07, 0.02, 0.01
CPU usage
6%
Memory usage
6% of 4031 MiB
SWAP usage
0% of 8191 MiB
Disk usage ( / )
0% of 209GiB - ufs
Disk usage ( /var/run )
3% of 3.4MiB - ufs in RAM

note: this will be changing as i ordered a g4400T processor and will order a board as soon as feasible. plan on using one of the cases i bought for this project

4

Thanks for the input! I am going to be installing it so as I can play around with the plug-ins and configs. it has available to the fullest. I am not worried too much about failure as I backup everything regularly. However, I would like to make use of the second SATA port with RAID being an option. As it is an older board with SATAII I willing to use RAID-0 if the added speed would help with performance. If, not I would probably use RAID-1 as an added fail safe.

5

RAID 0 would be totally useless, RAID 1 would be useful if you're worried that a disk failure will take down your internet connection. But if you're going to do RAID 1 don't use your motherboard's built in RAID, use the built in GEOM mirroring (or ZFS which will be in 2.4) so that you can see the disk status and manage everything from within the webui.

4 Likes
6

Thanks for the input! Since, disc access doesn't seem to be a big factor in performance, I am leaning toward using RAID-1 just to make use of the second SATA port. Plus, a little added peace of mind, as I would like the up time to be as constant as possible.

7

You almost won't ever be able to utilize raid in PfSense.

8

If you have the desire to be silly you could always try dual Pfsense (HA) - High Availability but unless you are running a high volume porn site I don't think there would be much reason to do so.