Does FreeNAS run in a ramdisk even when not installed to a USB Drive?

[Husky]

Hello,

short question. Maybe somebody knows how FreeNAS works under the hood when it comes to ramdisk usage. I know that FreeNAS runs in a RAMDISK if you install it to a USB drive to minimize writes and not kill the USB drive unnessecarily.

Is that also true if the drive is detected as a normal hdd? I have it running on a small USB "drive" that is integrated as a memory module on the mainboard and that identifies itself as a normal SATA drive. Since i know that USB drives do not have such a good lifespan i am worried that this will not be suitable as a drive for freenas.

If it runs "differently" than a installation on a USB drive is there any flag or config i can change to make it behave like a hdd would be a USB drive?


Greeting :D

 

[danb35]

I know that FreeNAS runs in a RAMDISK

You "know" incorrectly; this hasn't been the case for 3+ years (since the release of 9.3). The boot volume is now a live ZFS pool, no matter what the boot device is. ZFS caching means that most of the OS will live in RAM most of the time, but there is no RAMdisk as there once was.

 

[Husky]

Oh - well then sry for being misinformed O_O

So that means it shouldn't be a big issue to run it from the memory module since we have freenas running from USB drives for years without any problems.

Thx for the fast response mate

 

[danb35]

n/p--it's just amazing how long outdated information persists (another example being the idea that it will run well on whatever castoff old hardware you have laying around).

 

[Husky]

Well - the last time i was digging into this behaviour was long ago and from a user perspective you don't dig into every single changelog of the system you use - you kind of just get used to it working as expected :p

And tbh the ramdisk approach kind of made sense when i read about it back then (ppl were complaining about it in some old thread that i read back then) - so i was just assuming it would still be the way it works today. *apologies*

 

[Chris Moore]

FreeNAS runs in a RAMDISK if you install it to a USB drive to minimize writes and not kill the USB drive unnessecarily.

USB drives do not hold up well. It is best to use a better device. I install FreeNAS to actual hard drives (a mirrored pair of 40GB laptop drives) and other people are using SSDs. While USB drives were once the recommendation, they are not now, even though they are still an available option.