Fastest Flash Drive and/or Recommendations for X7SBE flash drive

[WeeboTech]

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?

[prostuff1]

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.

[WeeboTech]

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?

[brian89gp]

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.

[brian89gp]

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.