SSD for a router?
 

So, I am working on gathering the parts to build a Router. It will most likely run ClearOS. I have selected the Gigabyte H77 Wifi board since it has 2 Gigabit NICs and the wifi is a bonus.
What I am curious is, can I safely use an SSD for the OS drive or will processing the network traffic thrash the drive? I have selected 4GB of 1333 DDR3 RAM as well as an Intel Celeron G530 CPU. I want this router to be light and fast on it's feet. It will be connected to a Gigabit Switch to handle any other devices I connect to the network.

No issues

at what point is a router going to need that much bandwidth and such low access times?

even if you cache all your web traffic, your network speeds are going to be well below that.

Low power, not just speed, I'd guess

i ran a smoothwall for a while myself, and i used a 40GB seagate 7200.7. more than fast enough for the caching it did.


lower power is kinda meh, cause a laptop 2.5" drive would do the same task with just as little power.

If a flash drive had NICs it would be plenty :p

I was thinking live CD, but they advise against it.

Just because I'm curious, what about a DOM or FDM? Recent news: http://www.techpowerup.com/179548/Su...e-of-FDMs.html

found a 32GB ADATA SSD for about $40. I also wanted to have it boot fast. Just curious if it would thrash an SSD or not. I have also looked at a Zecate setup or an intel Atom setup.

if you're using it for caching, its gunna thrash. it wont kill a modern SSD fast, but its going to wear it out faster than a mechanical will (and if its a 32GB, i doubt its that modern)

I was anticipating using it for Firewall, OS, PBX phone services, that kinda thing. Also, on newegg which is where i tend to source my parts, it is one of the cheapest drives there. It's cheaper for a new SSD than for a new HDD(in that size). I'm going to be running UPNP DLNA Media services through it via a separate server box. If I can swing it so that this router can double as a UPnP DLNA server that would pull files from external sources and push them to client boxes then that would be another thing to be installed to the SSD or HDD. But that is tertiary to the main goal of building a kickass router. I'm in school for CCNA and IT so it would be very useful to have something I can build small networks with and test out the stuff I learn in class.

Couldn't you use a RAMDrive? RAM is very cheap nowadays, is orders of magnitude faster than everything else, draws very little power, and doesn't wear out in time. You could have a spare HDD to flush the cache from RAM every X hours (or something along those lines), just to be safe from losing all your cached content in case of a power outage.

NO NEED! if you want use a USB flash drive. LOL.

that might be a bit too slow for this usage! Maybe if it's USB3 but i think that is a nice solution ;)

I was just going to say USB drive. A decent one should do ~15 MB/s with near zero access latency. It should also satisfy the low power requirement. Unless you're running as a caching proxy, there's no need for anything fancier.

i was thinking about this more, and the storage medium really doesnt mean much. these router OS's dont use much ram (meaning the majority of the time, its all going to be loaded into ram 100%), so its not going to use it for anything other than media access.

well, that is why I am curious what effect an ssd would have. I have considered running a UPnP DLNA server on it accessing a NAS for the media and serving it to other machines/nmp(network media player) devices on the network. Only if it could be done w/o hindering the router/firewall. I would start with a router and test it out to see if I could do it. If it works well, then I can swap out my folks router and media server setup with a NAS and this router/firewall/UPnP/DLNA media server.

usb flash drive with uhs-1 speed ratings can go up to 90 MB/s on usb3. The problem I see is that the chips on usb drives are actually lower quality than the SSD chips. USB drives have less endurance but it is not used as often. I'm not sure if using it for caching is a better idea than SSD. Thrashing will be worse on USB. TLC has just been introduced on SSD but I'm pretty sure it's been on other flash products for some time already.

SSD for OS/boot, add mechanical later if you want caching/media server?

yeah, that sounds about right.I'm curious what OS I should be using for the router. Untangle, Sm00thwall, IPCop, ClearOS, etc.

Ducky did you buy this yet?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ASRock-E35LM...item5895973e03

I have to wait for my Tax refund before i can do anything.

A gateway doesn't use a lot of memory and network traffic almost never gets swapped to the drive. You will have no problem whatsoever.

i used smoothwall back in the day. cant compare to the others since i never used them, but it was getting good when i finished using it.


i had a thought: why dont you mess around with them in a VM first, and see how it goes from there? you can bind USB adaptors to the OS, and get it on the network that way.

Good distros if you want something that will be easy to configure. I personally would use Ubuntu or Debian for a base install and pick packages as I need them. That process seems to work well with just about any machine I put Ubuntu/Debian on. A co-worker of mine would say that your best bet would be to use FreeBSD as a gateway, but once again, no easy to use front-end. You would get to learn how fun it can be to write iptables scripts, configuring bind, and DHCP. Fun stuff... at least to me. :p