first Nas build - ready for takeoff

[Chris Moore]

I see nothing wrong in using laptop hard drives, they are better than USB flash drives. I have a few laptop hard drives and I use them for various things.

They were not free, but the ones I am using were Toshiba and I got six in a lot that had never been used. Seriously, when I plugged them in and checked, they had zero hours on them. They have given me no trouble at all. I put two in each of my two systems as mirrored boot drives and kept two as spares but after two years I am thinking of putting the spares to work elsewhere because I don't anticipate a failure. The one I linked to was just an example and it was $9 and change with free shipping. That is barely more than I paid for my last USB stick.
You have to set it up as a chron job, but you can run SMART tests against them just like any other drive in the system and keep an eye on their health. For me, it has been great. I don't worry about my boot drive disappearing again and all the pain that caused me when it happened.

 

[joeschmuck]

And I'll bet you retain a recent configuration backup too.

 

[Chris Moore]

And I'll bet you retain a recent configuration backup too.

Config backups are important, but I only make them manually, when I make a change, which is not often. When I had my traumatic failure, I didn't have a current backup and I had made a lot of changes AND there had been a couple of version changes to FreeNAS too. The quick solution at the time was to just throw another USB stick in that system and reinstall FreeNAS and rebuild my configuration, after importing my pool. I didn't loose any data, but it took me a couple days to get all my configurations set back the way I wanted them. Mostly it was having to remember what I had done and how to do it.

 

[joeschmuck]

Config backups are important, but I only make them manually, when I make a change, which is not often.

I'm in the same boat. It is to the point that I only make a backup after I upgrade my FreeNAS version. I don't automate this process, it's not needed for me.

 

[Stux]

I automated it once.