OS drive SSD or SATA

[Julianh]

Hi All,

As the data moves between the “Stroge” node and the client, there seems little point in using a SSD instead of a normal hard disk as regards speed.

However, I was thinking of using a small, 60 GB SSD purely because it’s small and won’t take a drive bay.

Out of curiosity, am I correct? The imaging process will be no faster.

Thanks

[Sebastian Roth]

@Julianh Quite often disk IO is a bottle neck. Therefore I suppose imaging will be faster on the SSD drive.

[Quazz]

Clients are usually the bottleneck, an SSD and faster CPU there helps a ton.

I don’t think an SSD on the FOG server will make a huge difference for top speed (depending on the state of the hard drive), but it may increase concurrency.

[george1421]

I started doing some benchmarking on making fog go faster here: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10459/can-you-make-fog-imaging-go-fast
Warning: that post has a ton of data in it as I tried to document each step

I ran out of extra time to work on it consistently. There are benchmarking numbers in there. If you have a single hdd disk in your fog server AND you are trying to deploy multiple unicast images to different computers at the same time a ssd in the fog server will help quite a bit.

For fog to go really fast you need 4 things.

1. Fast disk subsystem in fog server (helps greatly when sending out multiple simultaneous images at the same time)
2. Fast network infrastructure
3. Fast NFS configuration
4. Fast target computer

[Julianh]

Hi all,

I don’t think I was clear. Sorry.

I’m going to have a seperate SSD Raid array for the images. but I was going to use a SSD as the OS drive, for no other reason than it’s not going to use a drive bay. I was just curios if it would make FOG run faster.

Thanks

[george1421]

@julianh A SSD for only the OS will not add much value making FOG go fast. The critical data path is from /images -> nfs -> network -> target computer.

[x23piracy]

it’s all about network througput and storage fastness comparing to the network speed
would be interesting to see the deployment speed with a native 10gbit lan and ssd raid for storage …and sure the client should have ssd too.

But i can tell you 1gbit lan and hdd in the storage node can easily deploy a 16gb image within 2 minutes to a system with ssd i see it daily happen again and again hehe