Boot Drive question

[infinit0s]

Hello everyone,

Happy to finally join the TrueNAS community :)!

It is my understanding that it is no longer recommended to boot software from a USB drive and preferably an SSD hard drive should be used - this raises a question that I can not get my head around. The OS 'weighs' only a couple of GB yet the smallest SSD available on the market is (at least in Poland where I am) 120GB. It is fairly cheap but since one can not install even jails on the boot partition why the sudden change from USB to SSD - is there any other reason other than 'USB' is not as reliable as SSD? Also are there any works in progress to allow partition resize (in a supported way) so the OS can be installed i.e on a 20GB partition while the rest of the SSD can be used for Jails instead - leaving the regular HDDs for just the storage? In a couple of year's time, even 120GB SSD might be difficult to source and 240 could be the new 'smallest' size - which ultimately means a LOT of the space goes to waste with the current architecture.

Unless I am missing something :)?

 

[sretalla]

is there any other reason other than 'USB' is not as reliable as SSD?

USB controllers can't typically handle the load from ZFS transaction groups and this tends to push them to early failure when running FreeNAS.

SSD controllers can handle it.

SSDs with larger than needed capacity can be used to host the system dataset and will keep the "constant" writes off your data pool if you move it to the boot pool.

SSDs that are much larger than needed can do wear levelling to get to a much longer life when they aren't full.

SSDs are practically no more expensive than USB sticks.

 

[danb35]

is there any other reason other than 'USB' is not as reliable as SSD?

This really is the primary reason. The extra space can be used for wear leveling, though, so it isn't a complete waste.

Also are there any works in progress to allow partition resize (in a supported way) so the OS can be installed i.e on a 20GB partition while the rest of the SSD can be used for Jails instead

I'm not sure if there's anything supported in the works, but IIRC @Patrick M. Hausen has written up how to do it.

 

[joeschmuck]

In a couple of year's time, even 120GB SSD might be difficult to source and 240 could be the new 'smallest' size - which ultimately means a LOT of the space goes to waste with the current architecture.

While I applaud the fact that you are like many of us, seeing waste and wanting to use it, but the sole purpose of switching to a SSD is purely for reliability and now a SSD is fairly inexpensive as well, but you just need to think of it as the cost of making a well functioning piece of hardware. Many of us have partitioned the boot SSD to see if we could do it but as you stated it's not supported so it's very easy to lose your data on a different partition if you are not very careful. I decided that for me it was not worth the effort to manually manage the unsupported partition.

So think that you bought a SSD that will last a long time, not that you have unused space or it will drive you crazy.

 

[infinit0s]

Many of us have partitioned the boot SSD to see if we could do it but as you stated it's not supported so it's very easy to lose your data on a different partition if you are not very careful.

Yes - I've seen the tutorial but since I am new to the system i do not want to go balls deep into things that i do not fully understand.

So think that you bought a SSD that will last a long time, not that you have unused space or it will drive you crazy.

I guess I will have to do that :)