Editing Storage (section)

== Flash vs Spindle ==
[[File:flashmeme.jpg|200px|border|right]]In this day and age, the discussion over whether to use flash is very nearly over in the enterprise, and this holds even more true in the homelab. The cost of flash has reduced so significantly, and drive capacities have grown so significant, there is very little reason to use spindle-based storage anymore. The latter should only really be used for providing you with capacity for VMs or data, as opposed to running workloads. The performance you get out of using flash in the homelab will provide numerous benefits, including, but not limited to:
* Your VMs boot far quicker, so this gives you more reason to power everything off when not in use, saving you money and noise.
* Flash drives don't make any noise, so have a direct impact on [[WAF]]! Of course, you still need to cool them, so some moving parts will be required somewhere!
* You can clone VMs from templates in seconds, and spin up a new environment in a matter of minutes, meaning you spend more time labbing, and less time staring at progress bars.
* Traditionally storage has commonly been the bottleneck to performance. By going all flash, even with relatively slow CPUs, everything will feel snappier and your bottleneck then moves to your compute!

Of course if you already have a homelab in place and you don't have the budget to flashify it, there are other options. For example, it is also possible to emulate an SSD if you are using VMware vSphere as your hypervisor. This is really useful if you want to do things like test our VMware VSAN but you have no or an insufficient quantity of flash-based drives. William Lam covers this step by step in the following articles:
* [http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2013/07/emulating-ssd-virtual-disk-in-vmware.html Emulating an SSD Virtual Disk in a VMware Environment]
* [http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2013/08/quick-tip-marking-hdd-as-ssd-or-ssd-as.html Quick Tip – Marking an HDD as SSD or SSD as HDD in ESXi]