Does the Boot USB's speed matter?

[josecuervo]

Does FreeNAS do much reading/writing with the USB after boot? Will I have problems if I use a really crappy USB stick for booting?

 

[9C1 Newbee]

I'd say you would be fine once it booted. The way I understand it, it loads everything into ram anyway.

But, a ZFS scrub may find issues. I say use it and do a scrub. I'd get a quality usb drive ASAP though.

 

[nick779]

I wouldnt use a "crappy" drive. I mean it does house the boot partition... I used a garbage 8gb "Dane" flash drive I got at work to test on, and it corrupted within 2 weeks resulting in an unstable system. Ran chkflsh and it had numerous bad sectors.

Ive had really good luck with the kingston data traveler 16gb metal cased drives. Theyre dirt cheap and solid. $7.50/16gb/amazon

Ive had a 16gb at work doing a chkflsh burn test for a few weeks now just to see what kind of life to expect from it and it hasnt found a single error after a few hundred GB of writes.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I was going to say the same thing. A good USB flash drive costs under $10. Just buy a new one and be done worrying about it.

 

[Ericloewe]

Or better yet: Get two, mirror them and significantly reduce future downtime.

 

[sef]

The speed of the thumb drive does factor into performance -- the boot speed won't matter much, and most operations don't take a lot of time. However, upgrades will depend on performance of the thumb drive.

A thumb drive that costs $10 is not going to be a particularly good one, unless it's on sale.

We continue to recommend a SATA DOM if at all possible.

 

[9C1 Newbee]

....SATA DOM....

$40 ouch!

$8 16gig Sandisk