Comments on: Why SATA-DOMs Are Better than USB Drives for Booting Up Your FreeNAS System

By: Sven Oxtoby

Sven Oxtoby — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 05:16:12 +0000

1. Thanks for the heads up.
2. “melting point of economics and NAND design” – did you mean melting pot perhaps? Not trying to be a smart-ass; just don’t understand the sentence.
3. “Unfortunately for us at iXsystems, most FreeNAS users use consumer-grade thumb drives as their boot medium.” In my case at least, this is because iXSystems’ official recommendation (on web site) a few years ago, was to do exactly this! I did wonder why we weren’t being told to use SSDs.
4. Thanks for a great (and free) product.

By: Andrew N.

Andrew N. — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 02:53:55 +0000

In this official Supermicro document it says that SM SATA DOM’s should not be mirrored. Do you have any idea why this might be? https://www.supermicro.com/datasheet/datasheet_SuperDOM.pdf

By: Chris Moore

Chris Moore — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 16:38:59 +0000

In reply to Andrew English.

While true that some USB thumb drives are better than others, generally, they are all pretty bad.
Part of the problem is that there are many knockoff units (addressed in the article) but another factor involved in the author’s frustration is that many people choose to purchase the cheapest drive they can find when selecting the boot device for their storage.
Obviously, you didn’t fall into that trap, but it happens to other people all to frequently. The blog post is trying to inform people, so they can make better choices.

By: clark

clark — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 20:55:15 +0000

It appears SSDs are cheaper than SATA-DOMs on Newegg and Amazon, so what’s the point?

By: freenasuser

freenasuser — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 19:18:44 +0000

In reply to scott@sremick.net.

I totally agree with scott@sremick.net

By: Joon Lee

Joon Lee — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 21:02:39 +0000

In reply to Barry. Thanks for reading! Thank you for your support! Go redundancy!

By: Joon Lee

Joon Lee — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 20:50:41 +0000

In reply to Sam Kear. Sean won you over!

By: scott@sremick.net

scott@sremick.net — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 21:06:21 +0000

Well, I’d love to… except all 6 of my SATA ports are needed for my 6 spinny disks so I have none available for a SATA-DOM or the ability to add more with this hardware setup.
I do what I can to keep backups of my config.
This feature request would also help people immensely, hopefully it gets implemented:
https://redmine.ixsystems.com/issues/24173

By: Barry

Barry — Sun, 11 Nov 2018 05:26:31 +0000

I read this while drinking wine and it hit home lol. I’ve never not had any trust for storage than i’ve had reading this. *stares over at freenas hardware*. Thanks for the write up.
However trying to look at the brighter side…Redundancy has always been my savior tbh 🙂
Well, cheers!

By: Andrew English

Andrew English — Sat, 10 Nov 2018 13:20:07 +0000

I have been using high quality USB thumb drives on my R510 for over 2 years now and not had any issues with them. I know that most IT engineers think that there is no difference in the quality of a USB thumb drive regardless of the brand, unfortunately they be wrong.