External USB boot drives failed

[giacombum]

Hello to all,

I experienced a lot of failure in external usb boot disks in the past year: I've to change 3 drives that failed. I've a mirrored boot environment.

It could be related to a wrong configuration? I don't know, too much writes on the drives? How can I check that everything is "formally" right?

 

[sretalla]

Recent versions of FreeNAS have been much more write intensive on the boot pool and with the latest update, I see that the documentation was even updated to identify USB boot drives as a bad idea (not preferred).

You can try to mitigate it a bit by making sure your System Dataset is on another pool, but otherwise, for “mission critical” systems, switch to SSD/SATA DOM for boot. (Or even an old spinning disk).

Make sure you save your config to one of your data pools regularly (or automatically) and you don’t even really need a mirror.

 

[giacombum]

Recent versions of FreeNAS have been much more write intensive on the boot pool and with the latest update, I see that the documentation was even updated to identify USB boot drives as a bad idea (not preferred).

You can try to mitigate it a bit by making sure your System Dataset is on another pool, but otherwise, for “mission critical” systems, switch to SSD/SATA DOM for boot. (Or even an old spinning disk).

Make sure you save your config to one of your data pools regularly (or automatically) and you don’t even really need a mirror.

Oh, I didn't notice that. Bad to know, I don't have any SATA port available, so probably I've to switch to a PCI SSD.

 

[sretalla]

so probably I've to switch to a PCI SSD.

Or use a PCIe SATA controller (not really recommended) or an HBA (recommended) to give you more SATA ports.