AVB
Contributor
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2012
- Messages
- 174
I had two 25GB (yeah that is 25 not 250) Sata drives laying in my parts box. Not much you can do with those anymore so I thought I'd use them for a mirrored boot drive in my FreeNAS box. After looking around the forum I found a few posts on the subject of how to "upgrade" from a USB stick to mirrored SSD. While not terribly difficult still seemed to take more effort then I thought was required.
Now I'm not any FreeNAS boy wonder but I got to thinking about the built in mirroring ability for the boot drive built right into FreeNAS. Does FreeNAS really care that the drives aren't the same type in this situation? This is what I concentrated on and for as much digging around and questions I asked I never found or got a definitive answer.
So with a fresh full backup done, my configuration saved, a copy of my boot USB made I was ready to see what FreeNAS would do with a USB Boot stick mirrored to an SSD drive. Installing the drives in my box I fired it up and checked to make sure FreeNAS saw them and then went to the System-Boot-Status section and attached one of my SSD drives as the mirror. After a fairly short period of time the operation completed and the USB and SSD were mirrored. That done, I clicked on the USB drive and used the replace command to use the other SSD as the replacement for the USB stick and that worked too.
Shutting down the system I took out the USB stick and booted up. No problems what-so-ever. Did it again 5 more times and everything came up fine all 5 times. Copied some data, checked my shares made sure my HTPC could still see and read the FreeNAS box - all OK. So unless I triggered some secret internal FreeNAS glitch that will eat all my data when I'm not looking I think this is the way to go if you want to use some of those old SSD drives to upgrade your USB stick boot.
Now I'm not any FreeNAS boy wonder but I got to thinking about the built in mirroring ability for the boot drive built right into FreeNAS. Does FreeNAS really care that the drives aren't the same type in this situation? This is what I concentrated on and for as much digging around and questions I asked I never found or got a definitive answer.
So with a fresh full backup done, my configuration saved, a copy of my boot USB made I was ready to see what FreeNAS would do with a USB Boot stick mirrored to an SSD drive. Installing the drives in my box I fired it up and checked to make sure FreeNAS saw them and then went to the System-Boot-Status section and attached one of my SSD drives as the mirror. After a fairly short period of time the operation completed and the USB and SSD were mirrored. That done, I clicked on the USB drive and used the replace command to use the other SSD as the replacement for the USB stick and that worked too.
Shutting down the system I took out the USB stick and booted up. No problems what-so-ever. Did it again 5 more times and everything came up fine all 5 times. Copied some data, checked my shares made sure my HTPC could still see and read the FreeNAS box - all OK. So unless I triggered some secret internal FreeNAS glitch that will eat all my data when I'm not looking I think this is the way to go if you want to use some of those old SSD drives to upgrade your USB stick boot.
