FreeNAS + ESXI 6.5 + USB-Drives

[Beep]

Hi, I'm currently experimenting with different settings/systems and need your help.

I have an ESXI 6.5 machine and I'm using FreeNAS 11.1-U3 as a virtual machine. I have 2x3TB USB-Drives attached to the ESXI machine and directly passed through to the FreeNAS to create an mirrored zfs pool.

Currently my server does only have one internal SSD disk (Intel NUC) so I can't use internal disks instead of usb-drives. What do you think, is it possible to use USB-drives with zfs / FreeNAS?

Or do you think that as long as I don't have any internal disks (for data storage) I should use another filesystem than zfs? Maybe btrfs (XPENOLOGY / OpenMediaVault)?

I'm currently often have an degraded zpool which I can get online again with scrubbing disks.

Thank for your advices and hints.

 

[Johnnie Black]

USB devices are not recommended for ZFS, especially in mirrored or raidz configurations, since they are usually very bad at error handling.

Maybe btfrs

Same problems as ZFS

 

[Beep]

I think a dual docking station SATA HDD > USB 3.0 wouldn't be better ( http://www.delock.de/produkt/62661/merkmale.html ). The problem is the communication between RAM and USB?

 

[Chris Moore]

A Nuc does not have the right hardware for FreeNAS because you don't have a way to attach the storage. USB is handy, and I use it with windows, but the reliability of the interface is not good enough for FreeNAS / ZFS. Communication is sometimes dropped by USB and that would break things because they were designed to run on enterprise servers with reliable hardware.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Beep]

Okay, thank you.

So no ZFS or BTRFS with mirrored USB drives... So I have to change/replace my server first.

 

[Stux]

Pretty much

 

[Chris Moore]

Currently my server does only have one internal SSD disk (Intel NUC) so I can't use internal disks

So I have to change/replace my server first.

An Intel NUC is not meant to be a server, which is why it can't really do the job. This is an actual server:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5173247&CatId=30
and all you need to do is increase the RAM and add some drives.
If you want something with a little more guts to it, this is a good option:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5046494&CatId=30