Using RAM instead of disk for build servers (was: Re: Build servers offline due to failed SSD)

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 15, 2021, at 09:50, Steven Smith wrote:

> SSD RAID offers speed and fault tolerance.

Sure. That either wasn't available or was not within what I was willing to spend in 2016 when I set up this system.


> Simple options that are tolerant to a single disk failure are:
> 
> 	• Free/one extra SSD: Use macOS Disk Utility to RAID 1 together two smaller, inexpensive SSD drives for 100% redundancy.
> 	• OWC ThunderBay 4 Mini, $279: Use macOS Disk Utility to RAID 1 together four smaller, inexpensive SSD drives for 100% redundancy and larger capacity.
> 	• OWC ThunderBay 4 Mini with SoftRAID, $379: Use SoftRAID to RAID 4 together four smaller, inexpensive SSD drives for 100% redundancy and even larger capacity. (Caveats: no encryption, no boot volumes.)

Software RAID is not possible with VMware ESXi, which is what we are using and which is where the storage needs to be addressable from*.

*with the exception of the hard disk RAID that holds the master copy of the rsync server, including packages and distfiles, which is the built-in hardware RAID of one of the Xserves which VMware ESXi itself cannot use but which is mapped directly into the single VM that needs to use it.