Freenas switching from hard drive to USB stick

[mkrohn]

I originally set the OS up on a WD raptor drive and I've since decided that I want to use every available connection for more drives in my array. Any suggestions for moving the freenas boot location?

 

[westrock2000]

I wouldn't run anything data critical on a USB Flash Drive (since you said "stick"). USB flash drives have all kinds of data consistancy problems that usually aren't noticable when accessed here and there, but for something that could be accessing repeatedly all day, I wouldn't trust it. Now you could stick a real harddrive in a USB enclosure and probably be ok (though the USB protocol itself can be flaky). But you might be better of using something like a PCI 2.5" disk holder (Example 1 Example 2 Example 3) or getting a PCI SATA expansion card with external SATA connections and just having an external SATA drive (there is "normal" SATA and eSATA, so watch out for the external connections).

I have pretty good quality Samsung 128GB USB3 flash drive that I use to manage new music on and it has a really hard time playing music AND modifying tags on lots of songs at the same time. It will often interrupt the music and sometimes it just sits there for 5-10 seconds seemingly doing nothing. The other day I was listening to music and then also converting WAV to FLAC and then moving the WAV and FLAC files to different folders and holy cow the USB stick came to a crawl. Granted you won't be moving lots of data at once on your system drive, but I think the issue here was queue depth on the USB stick, it just didn't like multiple requests at the same time.

 

[Zedicus]

you could run freenas from a cdrom, USB thumb drive, etc with no issue. the 'Host" part does not matter, its where the ZFS is that counts.

just use freenas 'backup config' then install a new freenas on the USB and import the ZFS and configs, you are golden. it is actually way easier to do a new install and export import, than it is to 'move' an install.

 

[mkrohn]

you could run freenas from a cdrom, USB thumb drive, etc with no issue. the 'Host" part does not matter, its where the ZFS is that counts.

just use freenas 'backup config' then install a new freenas on the USB and import the ZFS and configs, you are golden.

cool, yeah I've been seeing a ton of people using freenas like this and I'd like to have multiple USB sticks available to have as much redundancy as possible. I have pretty much every piece of the server available to swap in if ever needed.

 

[Zedicus]

freenas updates so often its really not worth keeping a cold spare on the shelf preinstalled. plus the installation takes as long as an update anyways. just keep a good copy of your backed up config on hand incase something happens. then all you have to do is load freenas and laod the saved config and done.

heck i reloaded freenas from scratch the other day and had to rebuild from scratch as my config was saved onto the ZFS that i could not get to because my freenas box was offline. (oops) i was still back up and running exactly as before within an hour. and i have a fairly complicated freenas config as it is bound to active directory.