Hi All,
Could anyone pleas advice on what drive to buy between Westwern Digital Red vs Westwern Digital Purple and finally Seagate IronWolf.
The FreeNAS will be use as classic file storage but it will also be use as storage backend for xcp-ng.
Thank you in advance
Personally I am not a huge fan of using small NAS appliances with spinning disks for VM storage since the IOPS needed require quite a few spindles. Each drive will get you around 150 IOPS. It might be enough for what you are doing, but the first ceiling you will hit is performance and not capacity.
Hi @FredFerrell what would be an acceptable of disk array?
I also have a Dell C2100 that has 24 drive.
Will that be any better
I think 24 drives is much better than 3 or 4 drives in a small RAID. Also I was taking a look at some drive performance numbers and when it comes to 7.2K SATA drives they only deliver about half of what I am used to with 10K SAS drives, so only about 75 IOPS. It is recommended that a single VM would have 10-40 IOPS. If you are running a DB, you will need more.
With the Dell 2100, assuming RAID6 with a single hot spare, you would be looking at 1,575 IOPS that would support around 40 VMs. In comparison, a 4 drive RAID 5 would support around 8 VMs.
I was thinking of the C2100 as FreeNAs storage backend not main xcp-ng server.
I will be using 3x Dell R610 with 6x 146 sas 10k in them.
Ok, I see. I was thinking you were going to use iSCSI or NFS to present storage to the virtual hosts.
What’s your budget? Spinning disk a lot cheaper than flash storage.
You could add a separate pool (mirror, z1, z2, etc) of ssds for a place to store your VMs. This might be a good way for you to get the best of both worlds. Toms has done at least 1 YouTube video comparing transfer speeds of spinning disks for VM use with cache/zil drives for sync writes.