Redundant M.2 SATA SSD's in pfSense Firewall
![Redundant M.2 SATA SSD's in pfSense Firewall](/content/images/size/w2000/2019/01/c1hvCSy.jpg)
This will be a short one since I have moved on from this configuration
A year or two ago I wanted to have redundant SSD's in pfSense, and I happened to find some very cheap 32GB Hynix M.s SATA SSD's. I bought an M.2 to SATA adapters and threw them in. I configured them with ZFS and put them in a GEOM Mirror within pfSense
Here you can see where I placed them in the system, and how I managed the cabling
![](https://blog.networkprofile.org/content/images/2018/12/0F67ELA.jpg)
![](https://blog.networkprofile.org/content/images/2018/12/c1hvCSy.jpg)
After a few months, one of the SSD's dropped out of the mirror, so I threw in a spare SSD I had laying around
![](https://blog.networkprofile.org/content/images/2018/12/2018-04-21-11.20.00.jpg)
![](https://blog.networkprofile.org/content/images/2018/12/2018-04-21-11.20.07.jpg)
The other small Hynix SSD ended up failing too, and I moved away from this setup. While I was investigating the problem with the SSD's dropping out of the mirror, I noticed that there was a LOT of data written to them, and they had already gotten half way to their TBW within a few months. It turns out pfSense is quite hard on SSD's, and these SSD's simply weren't durable enough
Eventually I fixed the issue, and you can read about it on the latter part of my blog post here. Its a simple fix, and in my opinion should be the default configuration
Overall I did like this setup, and if you follow the above links advise an enable RAMDisk, I can see this being a viable setup. There was no downtime when swapping out the SSD's and rebuilding the mirror