SSD worthwhile & recommended install drive size?

[audigex]

Hi

I've got an HP Microserver on the way (£100 cashback offer was too good to miss when I've been eyeing up a home server for a while). My Raspberry Pi hasn't been cutting it lately, and messing about with Zentyal on a VM has made me want to set it up properly.

I want to keep the OS separate from the storage, so I was looking at either installing on a USB drive which I believe is possible (and the Microserver has a handy internal USB slot) or an SSD.

So my two questions:

1) Would an SSD be worthwhile? Or rather, will I notice the difference over a USB drive?
2) What size drive (USB/SSD, whatever I decide on) should I use for the Zentyal install?

Thanks

[christian]

I'm running HP microserver (HPN40L) with SSD as system drive.
I can't really comment in term of performance impact as I never tried it with HDD    but believe that this is hardly impacting end-user experience unless you have memory shortage and use SSD for your swap partition (but as I've also plenty of memory, no swap here  )

You can use quite small SSD (no need to run Zentyal on 128GB "disk".
What I did, I addition to SSD and RAID for data is to have one dedicated disk (HDD) for logs on EXT2 partition.

Doing so, you ensure that if log partition is full your system will face minimum impact and I/O due to log will not impact system and data access.

Compared to USB drive: at least during start-up, yes difference will be significant. On N40L, USB is USB 2.0, not 3.0 (if I remember well)

[audigex]

Excellent, thanks. It sounds like USB isn't the way to go, then, and that an SSD isn't really necessary although could be nice to have.

I'll probably just stick with the 250GB HDD which comes with the server for now. Startup isn't a big issue as the server will be on pretty much 24/7. I might look at a small SSD though, if the price makes sense. I'll be using 4GB RAM which should be plenty for my needs (the Raspberry Pi was covering most of it with 256MB and 800Mhz, so I should be well above that with 2.2GHz dual core and 4GB, even though I'm adding extra duties). An SSD later will be my first port of call if I suspect the OS is causing sluggishness, but most use will be HTPC streaming (with a GPU doing the work) and NAS work, with maybe a simple server VM for experimentation.

Could I ask how large your Zentyal install is, and what services are installed to use that much space? A rough list would be fine, I don't want you having to dig out huge lists of what your server does: it's just so I can have an idea of what services it provides.

[christian]

Could I ask how large your Zentyal install is, and what services are installed to use that much space? A rough list would be fine, I don't want you having to dig out huge lists of what your server does: it's just so I can have an idea of what services it provides.

Does size matter ? 
Sorry, joking  I mean, more than size (this is still "SMB like" for about 4 to 6 users) what really matters is how you configure services.

From HP server standpoint, notice I'm running customized BIOS allowing HDD hot-plug and AHCI (SSD without AHCI is waste of money)

My Zentyal platform is acting as internet gateway, meaning FW, HTTP proxy, mail (+ additional mailing list server), VPN (I've few remote users), OwnCloud.
Obviously users & groups.
File sharing is deployed and configured but I'm only using WINS features as my NAS is another HP N40L running OpenMediaVault (relying on Zentyal LDAP).
Few web sites (vhost) to support, e.g. WPAD, webmail, OwnCloud (notice my mail service is standard mail. I don't need Zarafa)
DNS, DHCP, anti-virus and mail filtering are pretty obvious I suppose 

As I don't need all the 3.0 bells and whistles, I'm also still running 2.2

Last (and least  ) this platform implements multiple NICs in order to benefit from failover (multiple ISP) and also provide DMZ hosting another Zentyal (3.1 sandbox). On the other hand, I do not run any local X interface like gnome, unity or LXDE. That's a server isn't it? No keyboard nor display 

What will really impact such platform is the heaviness and complexity  of HTTP proxy.
Loading specific and complex filtering rules will have direct impact on performances.

Heavy usage of CIFS may also impact your platform (tested from OpenMediaVault  )

I hope this helps.

If I had to comment further your choice, allocating 250GB HDD as Zentyal system disk is waste of resource. 32GB is more than enough.
Power supply is not that big, neither air cooling. If you run 4 disks + powerful video card, pay attention to this.

[audigex]

Thanks, that's great - sounds like the 250 will be total overkill then - I'll either grab a cheap-ish 32/64GB SSD or just share some of the HDD space with other uses (laptop backup would probably work)

PSU is a concern I've been looking at - the 6450 I'm going to use isn't very powerful though, and apparently tops out at a maximum of 15W to 30W depending on the card (I believe the 30W was actively cooled but using the higher number to be on the safe side) while benchmarking, 13W/23W while playing Crysis for a couple of hours, or 9W/16W while playing a Blu-Ray. Considering I already have consoles and a gaming PC, I doubt I'll often be much above that 9W/16W mark.

Reckoning in 10W per HDD and a maximum of 5, that gives me an absolute max of 80W for the HDD+GPU assuming all drives are being written/read constantly and the GPU is being assaulted. That leaves 70W for the rest of the (fairly low power) system. As far as I can tell this is less than the system typically draws, but the PSU can supply 200W for short periods.

Not knowing what the system uses at load without HDD/GPUs, it's a little tricky to judge exactly, but I think I should be within limits at load: and at idle/typical use (playing a blu-ray from one raid-1 pair while streaming something from the other) I should be well under it.

Thanks though, it's definitely something worth bearing in mind. Right, now to get to grips with getting all of my services installed in a way that doesn't end up causing any conflicts.