Reliability without RAID setups

I

ilemur

Just for the information why I can't use RAID - I am currently setting up an all in one ESXi host. I have utilised an old HDD as a first datastore where I have installed FreeBSD 10. FreeBSD has a passthrough LSI controller attached with 6 HDDs in RAIDZ and this is my primary datastore for ESXi which is passed backed via iSCSI and NFS. Except for this and Samba, FreeBSD install is a minimal out of the box.

Recently i have discovered that my old HDD is failing and now I am trying to rethink the best possible strategy.
One idea is replacing the old HDD with a small SSD and moving /var and /usr/ports into the RAIDZ.

Maybe there are even better options? All I need is something reliable datastore to bring up FreeBSD to the point where RAIDZ is working.
 
The operating system does not have to be on the same RAIDZ array as primary storage. A simple gmirror() of two ordinary drives will make it more reliable. I use a couple of notebook drives just for this.

Some people use USB memory sticks, although some have problems. FreeNAS can boot from CD and run from RAM. The CD could be moved into a new drive if the drive failed, too. But it is inconvenient to save configuration data to a CD. If the CD contains just the operating system and configuration data is saved to a memory stick, it's easier to change.
 
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