PfSense Firewall with newer SSD's

[DelusionalSyko]

I'm not sure if anyone here has had past experience with PfSense Firewall installations, but I usually roll these out with customers who require a cheap reliable firewall setup, but I always use end up using an HDD from a donor PC that they have.

 

 

I've done a little research on the benefits of using an SSD for Pfsense, but this article came up against it: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=34381.0

 

But that was dated back to 2011, we have much better and much more reliable SSD's on the market now than we did in 2011. And they're experience with dead SSD's were with 8GB - 16GB capacity drives. 

 

My idea was to use something like a Samsung 850 Pro 120GB for the drive, but I'm not sure if the risk of killing the SSD is worth the performance gain (Not even sure if there IS a significant performance gain with an SSD)

 

that Samsung has a 5 year warranty, but I don't want the drive to die and have their firewall be dead until I get a replacement. Reliability is top priority for the drive.

 

So, does anyone HAVE experience with PfSense? If so, do you use a regular HDD, or an SSD in your build? I'm curious to see if it's worth it to start rolling these things out with SSD's for faster boot times.

[pspfreak]

Once pfsense is loaded, its loaded into ram. No speed increase will occur other than boot speed.

[twosome]

I used to use USB flash with pfSense, they kept dying on me cause I cheaped out and bought crappy ones. So this proves that pfSense does a lot of small random writes that will eventually kill flash drives. However, I do use an SSD now, OCZ Synaps. An old cache drive with 50 % over provisioning. I think that is the key here. Buy a small SSD and do a huge over provisioning, maybe 20-40 % even. The Samsungs will use the unallocated space to even out the wear of the drive.

 

The most performance gain you will see is if you use some sort of transparent proxy with caching like snort. And you will most certainly loose some of the vibration and noise over the HDD.

[TAtari]

My current pfSense box its overkill even for my gigabit connection, but a nice little box

 

MOBO: ASUS P9D-I C222
CPU: INTEL PENTIUM DUAL CORE G3220 3.0GHZ
STORAGE: KINGSTON SSDNOW V300 120GB
RAM: 2x KINGSTON 2GB 1600MHZ DDR3 ECC CL11
CASE: ANTEC ISK110 VESA

 

Its been running 24/7 for over a year now. Storage doesn't really matter it doesn't increase the performance... The reason I picked SSD over normal HDD was the noise factor.

You can run it of a USB drive but get one that is rated for a lot of writes.

[Jaybird]

I do not remember what i have I just know i tried to upgrade to a 16gb compactflash card and had some issues. well i had bigger issue such as chaning and setting a locking me out from the browser side. had trouble accessing using the seriel port. but all in all i think i am using a 4gb compact flash with 1gb of ram. I got this neat little box off ebay. maybe paid more than i should and maybe should have bought a box that wasnt a rare item to begin with, hense the zero support issue. but other than the loud little 30mm fan, i really like my little box. I would like a bigger drive so i could cache some websites. 

 

my box - http://imgur.com/a/L0gXJ

 

 

I would say, start rolling out with SSD. 

[dzonidev]

Unless you are running something like a 10Gbps connection and a disk intensive package, I see no reason for an SSD. There is absolutely no benefit.

[pspfreak]

My current pfSense box its overkill even for my gigabit connection, but a nice little box

 

MOBO: ASUS P9D-I C222

CPU: INTEL PENTIUM DUAL CORE G3220 3.0GHZ

STORAGE: KINGSTON SSDNOW V300 120GB

RAM: 2x KINGSTON 2GB 1600MHZ DDR3 ECC CL11

CASE: ANTEC ISK110 VESA

 

Its been running 24/7 for over a year now. Storage doesn't really matter it doesn't increase the performance... The reason I picked SSD over normal HDD was the noise factor.

You can run it of a USB drive but get one that is rated for a lot of writes.

Lol you think yours is overkill?

This is for a 50/5 connection.