BUILD 1st Build Hardware (Small Backoffice Server)

[Rafal Lukawiecki]

This is a often discussed theme in the Forum. It always come down to the fact that it is not possible or even desired. To me one of the most nice things of Freenas is the fact that in the worst case, when your boot device dies, you can reinstall Freenas and be back in business in no time at all. Just make sure that saving your configuration becomes a habit. Knowing that, I find it pretty convenient to leave my boot device as it is. No worries about other things on that drive.

Thank you. Assuming that FreeNAS configs have been backed up, and nothing else is saved to the boot dataset, would I be correct in thinking that for all practical purposes mirroring the boot SSD only saved the effort of not having to do a reinstall in case of its failure?

 

[Evertb1]

Thank you. Assuming that FreeNAS configs have been backed up, and nothing else is saved to the boot dataset, would I be correct in thinking that for all practical purposes mirroring the boot SSD only saved the effort of not having to do a reinstall in case of its failure?

Yes that is correct. In a mirrored boot device you will run with a degraded pool until the failed disk is replaced/resilvered. No reinstall needed and your system will stay available. I have lost a USB stick 2 times. Replacing the failed stick was no problem. Never the less I dumped the USB sticks and installed Freenas on a single SSD.

 

[danb35]

I am debating putting the boot OS, and perhaps the jails, on an SSD.

OS on an SSD is fine, but a single inexpensive SSD is completely adequate. As already discussed, the boot device can't hold anything else, so your jails couldn't go there.

But having jails on an SSD should make them faster—unless FreeNAS and ZFS is clever enough to move the executables into RAM ARC

It/they are, at least if those executables are frequently used.

 

[Stux]

Thank you. Is there no reasonable way of creating another ZFS dataset on the boot volume?

I wouldn't call it reasonable, but it can be done. If you are seriously thinking about it, I'd suggest using your SSDs as a dedicated pool, and booting off USBs instead.

You can find out how with some judicious forum searching, if you must.

 

[Rafal Lukawiecki]

I wouldn't call it reasonable, but it can be done. If you are seriously thinking about it, I'd suggest using your SSDs as a dedicated pool, and booting off USBs instead.

You can find out how with some judicious forum searching, if you must.

No, I'm happy with the suggsted consensus of storing on the boot. Happy to hear ARC is clever enough, and this machine may end up with 64GB RAM anyway, and 32 definitely.