Debating on if I should use a 16gb USB drive for my Solaris 11 Express SAN server. I intend to use Deduplication which I believe may be IO intensive for the DB. Though I can't be sure.
The SAN server is expected to be on 24/7 for a number of years. Should I somehow if possible use multiple USB drives and mirror the OS? Is read/write speed a concern? Some drives are 10MB/s write 5MB/s read. Some are 25MB/s R/W.
I intend to add a couple SSDs for ZIL and L2ARC at a later date.
Someone had previously suggested I simply install the OS onto the storage drives in the server. 4x 300gb 15k SAS 6x 2TB 5400rpm SATA.
But I'm not sure how to size the partitions on those disks and if having the OS on them adds some layer of complexity such as when/if I decided to grow the pool by pulling disks and adding larger capacity ones.