January 24, 201214 yr I have a generic cardreader flash drive for my unRAID machine with the X7SBE motherboard. It works, but it's painfully slow when booting up. I also have a X7SBA. I'm planning to remove the ABIT AB9 Pro mobo and use X7SBA to make that an ESXi host. What I'm looking for is a reasonable cost effective and fast flash drive for these motherboards. Did I say "fast" I do have the Kingston card readers I was planning to use for unRAID, but they are kinda bulky and wanted a smaller one to put inside the machine for the ESXi host. Also since I;m not familiar with ESXi yet, is it worthwhile to just use an SSD, install to that and also have it used as a datastore for VM's? Do I need a separate flashkey for ESXi? Thoughts? Recommendations?
January 24, 201214 yr I have a generic cardreader flash drive for my unRAID machine with the X7SBE motherboard. It works, but it's painfully slow when booting up. I also have a X7SBA. I'm planning to remove the ABIT AB9 Pro mobo and use X7SBA to make that an ESXi host. What I'm looking for is a reasonable cost effective and fast flash drive for these motherboards. Did I say "fast" I do have the Kingston card readers I was planning to use for unRAID, but they are kinda bulky and wanted a smaller one to put inside the machine for the ESXi host. Also since I;m not familiar with ESXi yet, is it worthwhile to just use an SSD, install to that and also have it used as a datastore for VM's? Do I need a separate flashkey for ESXi? Thoughts? Recommendations? I have used the verbatim clip-it USB drives for a lot of unRAID builds and never had a problem with them. They boot unRAID pretty darn fast and ESXi also. I would not bother installing ESXi to the SSD, just run it from a USB thumb drive. You register ESXi from within vShpere with the key you get after registering on the VMWare site, no need for a special flashkey of the like.
January 25, 201214 yr Author Have you ever done a DD to read the whole drive for a benchmark. From what I've been reading the Patriot XT Rage is pretty fast and approaches 30MB/s, Which is about the limit of USB 2.0 Does ESXi do allot of writing to the flash key?
January 25, 201214 yr Does ESXi do allot of writing to the flash key? Hardly any. Unless you export logs it doesn't even save those through a reboot.
January 25, 201214 yr What I'm looking for is a reasonable cost effective and fast flash drive for these motherboards. Did I say "fast" Used a generic cheepo thumb drive and a Lexar Firefly, couldn't tell the difference in boot times for ESXi. At work there isn't much of a difference between booting from the cheap 2gb HP thumb drive and the onboard 15k SAS drives. Also since I;m not familiar with ESXi yet, is it worthwhile to just use an SSD, install to that and also have it used as a datastore for VM's? There are times that having ESXi seperate from your VMFS stores is a good thing. The SSD will be used and thus will go bad faster, the USB thumb drive is only used when ESXi is booted. Though with that said, I currently have ESXi installed to a thumb drive and will be installing it to a SSD and using the rest as a datastore. My only reason is that since I am using a Lexar Firefly for ESXi, and Lexar Firefly's for unRAID, it is annoingly difficult to select the right USB device to boot from. A SSD on a SATA port will make the boot selection process easy because it is the only device on SATA. I'll use the remainder of the SSD for static files (the non-persistant unRAID vmdk's and ISO images) to keep the wear and tear down. Do I need a separate flashkey for ESXi? If you install ESXi to a USB thumb drive, it needs to be its own seperate thumb drive used for no other purposes.
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