Can I run TrueNAS on SSD's mounted on USB adapters

[zogthegreat]

Hi everyone!

So I'm playing around with a HP T620 thin client, and I had a thought. The box has two internal USB ports and what I want to do is run TrueNAS off of two 16gb M.2 drives mounted on NGFF/M.2 to USB adapters like this:

USB 3.0 to Nvme M.2

My question is will this cause problems like a regular USB drive or will the drives be OK from the read/writes that TrueNAS does? It's my understanding that the main reason that USB drives fail is due to the cheap controllers that USB drives have. Since I'm running a regular M.2 SATA drive, I thinking that this problem won't come up. However, since I haven't found anyone else posting about doing this, I thought I would ask before breaking out my Dremel and soldering iron to squeeze in the two 2.5 1TB drives I'm planning to use for data. I will be using a modified mPCI-E adapter like this:

Mini PCI-E Express to SATA 3.0

I will be soldering the SATA cables directly onto the adapter after cutting them to the length I need. I will be getting power from some unused connectors on the motherboard.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

zog

 

[sretalla]

For the boot pool, it's perfectly OK to run on USB attached SSDs (SATA or NVME behind that fine either way).

USB is certainly not recommended for data pools though.

Watch out for excess heat in your build as the nature of ZFS transaction groups means that your SATA controllers will get bursts of very large IO and can tend to be driven to the limits of the hardware at time like resilvers and scrubs. Make sure you can get rid of that heat or you may cook your controllers.

 

[zogthegreat]

Hi @sretalla

Thanks for the information. Although the HP T620 is passively cooled, I am planning to add a 40mm fan to help keep everything cool. I'll post up my results when I have everything assembled.