Server installation on SD card

[rcfant89]

I have an R710 server and I was wondering about something. It has a slot for an SD card module and it has 6 3.5" bays for drives. I was using a 3.5" drive for the OS but I would love to use an SD card for the boot (since it's only 10-20 gigs for server 2012) and then have all 6 bays for storage.

I have read a lot of comments saying that performance won't be good, etc. Does anyone have any concrete performance comparisons between running a server os on a standard HDD vs a high performance SD card? If I was to get an SD card that is 100 MB/s read and write vs a 100 MB/s HDD, what would the difference be?

And I also read that the SD cards are not as resilient when it comes to writes, however I will be putting all my data on my RAID 5 (6x2TB) so there should be almost nothing being written to the server OS on the SD card, except maybe some updates.

As I stated, I read comments saying it was not recommended, however I would love to not burn up a slot on <20 gigs worth of OS data (not to mention a 64 gig "elite" SD card costs less than 25 bucks...

And if the card fails in 2-3-4 years, just buy a second one and slap the OS back on it, all the data is on the HDDs anyway.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Forget about any performance considerations, that's irrelevant. Read on .......................

You cannot install any version of Windows or Windows server editions on to an SD card because Windows Pre-install Setup will not show any external storage media or memory card. Hence you cannot choose a memory card as an installation target.