System disk speed is it important?

I

ilemur

I have a home server which runs samba, apache and a dozen of other services like torrents, video surveillance etc. All the samba data is stored in 3 disk RAID-Z and torrents|apache|surveilance are served from 2 disk zfs stripe. System itself resides on a single old 160GB disk. Server is equipped with 8GB RAM of which I've seen a max of 4GB utilised (cacti reporting). I'm planning an upgrade strategy so would like your opininon if it is worth moving the system to a new strip - will I see any perfomance gains? Mirror is also considered as it will minimise time spent on bringing the system from a weekly back up.
 
The kernel keeps in memory, all frequently used userland applications will keep in the filesystem cache, which resides in memory (unless you outsource it via zfs l2arc).

Unless you "flood" the cache by filling it with data, the speed of the system disk does not matter. Booting with an USB flash media will take 2-3 minutes to KDE but then run no slower then a SSD installation.

I would keep that one-slow-disk solution you have, unless you want to reuse the SAS/SATA connector, and then put the system on the same storage devices you have your data on (in a dedicated partition of cause).
 
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