I’m setting up a fresh installation of IPFire and I’d like to ask for your recommendations regarding storage configuration.
I have two WD Red SN700 NVMe drives. Would you suggest setting them up in RAID 1 from the beginning for redundancy, or is it better to install IPFire on one disk and use the second one later as an “Extra HD”, for example moving logs and other data there to distribute the load?
I’m aiming for a reliable and well-balanced setup, so any advice based on your experience would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance for taking the time to read and for any suggestions!
I’d reserve RAID1 for the system with logs and backups, keeping lower the consumption in a single disk install.
In firewalls, most of disk writing is made for logs (IDK if there’s any way reduce writing with different log strategy) and updates, therefore is hardly a disk intensive use of computers.
I would not split the filesystem into several parts. IPFire does not actually write a lot of data to disk. It writes log files and that is about it. Compared to any other server system that might run a database, or even a desktop computer, this is incredibly efficient.
I have not ever been able to break any flash storage in IPFire, even on a very busy system. All Lightning Wire Labs appliances come with a single SSD and we have not had a single return because of a broken SSD (we also use enterprise-grade components).
RAID 1 is nice for redundancy because your system will keep running if one of the SSDs breaks, but generally, that cannot happen because of too much usage.
