Constant USB-Flash wear and tear

[Andy Graves]

Hi there,
Have been burning in my first FreeNAS, ready to start using for real soon.
I am concerned about the fairly continuous use and therefore the long term life of the 2 mirrored usb-flash devices I am booting from. Should I be worried? (I have moved the system dataset pool away from the boot vol.)
Thanks
Andy

 

[Jailer]

Worried, no. As long as you have your config backed up and a spare usb drive laying around getting it back up and running from a boot drive failure is trivial.

 

[Ericloewe]

Hi there,
Have been burning in my first FreeNAS, ready to start using for real soon.
I am concerned about the fairly continuous use and therefore the long term life of the 2 mirrored usb-flash devices I am booting from. Should I be worried? (I have moved the system dataset pool away from the boot vol.)
Thanks
Andy

No, unless you have some truly atrocious USB drives (looking at you, Kingston...).

My drives have seen an absurd amount of updates. They must be around 60% full now. The only issue is that they're slower than is pleasant to work with - when I updated yesterday, it took 45 minutes (the first few updates were much faster).

Besides:

Worried, no. As long as you have your config backed up and a spare usb drive laying around getting it back up and running from a boot drive failure is trivial.

 

[Andy Graves]

Thanks for the comments,
Whilst your suggestions are reassuring, its still going to keeping me up at night I think...
Is there any way to stop the ongoing boot vol read/write activity, so that everything is done in RAM once booted? (apart from updates obviously)
thx

 

[Ericloewe]

Is there any way to stop the ongoing boot vol read/write activity, so that everything is done in RAM once booted? (apart from updates obviously)

No, but IO activity is limited anyway, outside of updates and boot environment manipulation.

 

[Andy Graves]

Drive activity seems continuous, hence my asking?

 

[Sakuru]

Reads don't hurt flash at all and there are very few writes to the boot drives outside of updates.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

its still going to keeping me up at night I think

You can set up regular scrubs on your boot pool, so at least you'll know if something is up.

 

[Andy Graves]

Thanks for the advice, will keep you posted as to how stable it is.

 

[Andy Graves]

Good morning,
Still seeing almost constant USD FLASH writes, I feel sure this will end in tears as they are not designed for this?
What are the writes for? can i stop them?
Thanks
Andy

 

[Pierce]

I went ahead and added a 2nd USB stick as a zpool mirror :) so if my primary stick fails, everything is on the 2nd one.

you do this in system->boot, instead of in storage->volumes, which seems a little a kilter, but works well enough.

 

[Andy Graves]

Hi Pierce, have done this, but feels like I have 2 devices being used in a way that means they will fail soon?