Storage Configuration Recommendations

[Eamonn]

Hi all, first post and looking for some advice.

I am building a FreeBSD home workstation and would like some opinions on how to configure my storage devices to best suit my daily workload. Box is an AMD Phenom II 955 quad core with 4 GB ram, a 90 GB SSD, a 250 GB SATA and a 300 GB SATA.

I am a freelance Django developer so my storage needs are a redundant /home and storage space for backups and a few virtualbox os's for testing. I typically have around 4-6 GB of data in my workspace folder at any one time but a lot of small files in my virtualenv directory (typically 10-15 python/django/mysql/postgresql installations).

I am trying to decide on the following storage configurations:
1. UFS with SSD sliced to 512 K /boot 30 GB / and 50 GB /home and a UFS mirror of the two SATA drives for snapshot storage and virtualbox data.
2. UFS / and /boot on the SSD with a 50gb L2ARC and /home on a ZFS mirror of the 2 sata drives.

My concerns are snapshot space and speed with option 1 using UFS, and using an L2ARC with option 2, would I see much of a cache hit with ZFS or would I just be wasting 50 GB of SSD space.

Option 3. Your suggestion?

 

[SirDice]

I'd go with a full ZFS-on-root install, ZFS has so many plus points it would be a waste not to use them. The two SATA drives ideally would be the same size for mirroring but it should work.

I have two RAID-Z pools, one is 11 TB and the other 1.5 TB. The big one is used to store my media files, the smaller one I use for building ports, jails etc. The machine has 8 GB of memory. I had added a small 320 MB SSD as L2ARC but it rarely got used (less than 2% usage). Even with poudriere building and doing a lot of disk I/O. In your case I'd try and split the SSD and use it as ZIL and L2ARC.