Allocating more reserve space on USB stick. (Slightly different size sticks)

[diskdiddler]

I discussed this somewhere recently and totally forgot, sorry.

Is this possible? I want to put in some 16gb sticks, I'm hoping to reserve out say an extra GB even, so that if a stick dies, FreeNAS is still happy with any other brands 16gb stick, despite minor size differences.

Can it be done for the USB boot sticks?

 

[dlavigne]

Did you find the answer to this?

 

[diskdiddler]

Did you find the answer to this?

No, and I'm much closer to needing it too.

Also want to do the same for my dual SSD mirror. I think default is 2gb on hard drives? I'm ok losing 20.

 

[diskdiddler]

Anyone else? I want to do this to at least 4 of my drives (2 USb and 2 SSD)

 

[pro lamer]

Brainstorm style crazy idea:

1. Create a virtual disk of a chosen small size
2. Install FreeNAS onto it
3. Do a byte by byte copy to the desired disk

Not sure how to fix the partition table anyway...

Sent from my mobile phone

 

[diskdiddler]

So the thing is, I've found in the menu for FreeNAS to configure it to have a larger swap allocation per disk.

I do not know if SWAP = reserved space?

I do not want swap, on my USB keys, period.


Even if swap is only reserved and it won't thrash my USB key, the USB key is made, according to a post I read, once you configure a larger than stock swap, it will only apply, to new pools you create. Clearly the boot pool itself, isn't going to be new.

So not sure of a solution.

 

[pro lamer]

Another idea:

1. For the sake of the example let's assume you have a small boot pool (virtual or real disks) eg 16GB
2. Disable automatic pool growth for the boot pool
3. Attach the bigger sized disk as a mirror (eg240GB) (beware that 3-way mirrors were found not possible for boot pools in our forums this year, I can't remember who exactly had that try)
4. If it works you have 224GB free
5. Then You may try replacing the small drive with a bigger one or creating some partitions/slices...

Sent from my mobile phone

 

[pro lamer]

Or to be more accurate with your SSD example:

1. Let's assume you have a physical 128 GB SSD and want to be ready for 120GB sized SSDs
2. Run a VM
3. Install FreeNAS to a virtual 119GB disk
4. Disable automatic pool growth
5. Attach your physical 128GB SSD as a mirror
6. Detach the virtual disk
7. Leave of the VMs
8. Use your physical SSD in a physical environment...

Sent from my mobile phone

 

[diskdiddler]

This is a crazy way to have to do this, to be fair :/ the software should support it properly I would say.