Flash drive troubles

[Stickrpg]

I've killed three flash drives in a little over a year running FreeNAS. I started using a generic 8GB drive I had laying around and it surprisingly lasted the longest. I then bought a SanDisk Ultra Fit direct from Newegg (not a reseller) and it died in less than a month. I thought it could be the old Supermicro hardware killing the flash drives so three months ago I bought all new hardware. I paired a Corsair Voyager I got from direct from Newegg with the new hardware... after three months it is now showing up as 13FE USB DISK 50X. Does anyone know of a flash drive that will last?

*Edit*
SanDisk and Corsair were the top recommended brands on the forum. I suppose I should try an SSD next?

 

[melloa]

Before I moved to SSD, I used SanDisk on all my FreeNAS servers. In year and a half only had one failing. What FreeNAS version are you using?

 

[Stickrpg]

Before I moved to SSD, I used SanDisk on all my FreeNAS servers. In year and a half only had one failing. What FreeNAS version are you using?

The first two died running 9.10 and the Corsair died on Corral.

 

[melloa]

I heard lots of people complaining about flash drive problems with Corral, but never heard of the same with 9.x.

Re: Your edit - I'd be running flash drives if I haven't retired some old PCs using SSDs.

 

[Stickrpg]

Thanks, I think I'll move to FreeNAS 11 and use the replacement Corsair Voyager until I find a suitable SSD.

 

[melloa]

I think I'll move to FreeNAS 11

I'd say is a better idea than run Corral in production. I'm old school and am always few months behind on new releases, so running 9.10 in production and 11 on testing box.

 

[saikee]

In the 5 months using FreeNas 9.10 in three PCs I have not experienced a failure in USB drives. Don't care much which one I laid my hand on so Lexa, Kingston, Scandisk, Transcend, Verbatim, PNY and Intenso all been tried.

I am surprised the USB could fail as it seems once the FreeNAS is loaded it only operates in memory and the USB will only be used when power down. None of my USB drive uses more than 1GB storage.

 

[danb35]

FreeNAS is loaded it only operates in memory

This hasn't been true for years. In the days of 9.2 and earlier, a ramdisk was created on boot, and the OS loaded into the ramdisk. Beginning with 9.3, the boot device is a live ZFS pool, and the OS lives on the pool. Caching means that most of the OS will be in RAM most of the time, but it isn't the way it had been.

 

[nojohnny101]

I suspect your high failure rate could be due to verbose logging or a persistent error message that is being written frequently. Had this happen to me and it killed flash drives very quickly.

So you have a lot in your console space at the bottom of the GUI?

 

[pschatz100]

At the end of the day, there is no such thing as a reliable flash drive. The best ones are just less unreliable. Over the years, I have had to replace one flash drive per year on average. A nuisance yes, but not a show stopper for me as replacing a bad flash drive is no big deal. However, installing FreeNAS on a small SSD drive will be more reliable and less troublesome. The only downside is that it takes up one Sata port for the SSD.

 

[rs225]

Moving the .system dataset off the USB might prolong their life.

 

[danb35]

Moving the .system dataset off the USB might prolong their life.

Happens automatically as soon as you create a storage pool. Unless you move it back, it won't be on the boot device.