Install Drive Suggestions - long term

[jtrainer01]

OK, I've bricked 3 USB Sticks only to finally find a thread that suggests booting from USB is no longer suggested. My current box is simply an old laptop and my storage is from the single drive internal. Sure I understand this is nowhere near-optimal, but until I relocate in a month or 2, I am simply getting to know FreeNAS until I rebuild my lab system. My last lab box didn't support USB boot and had a failed PS that took out the MB and only had a single core proc. My future lab box may become 2 systems, FreeNAS unto itself and all VMs on another hosted with VMware or XenServer.

To date, I am happily using SMB/NFS and iSCSI which includes boot from LAN luns. Nothing is about performance at this time, just me getting comfy with FreeNAS (hint it's not NetApp nor EMC which I use at work).

The input I'd like is this if I'm bricking a USB thumb drive and I'm stumbling on threads that say USB thumb drives are not suggested... I'd like to continue to boot from USB and use this old laptop until I move and have more room. However I would look to repopulate this install in the new lab box in a few months, should I look at an mSATA/simple 2.5 SSD or m.2 NVME for the FreeNAS installation?

My thoughts are, a simple 2.5 or mSATA should suffice as FreeNAS probably doesn't benefit from the m.2 as it's OS/Boot drive.

Any input is greatly appreciated. To date, my FreeNAS lab luns and shares are working with better performance than my old setup which was really about running crap that I didn't want to run on my main day to day computer.

thx

 

[ThreeDee]

Alternatively ... you can use a USB to SATA cable and run an inexpensive small SSD that would be powered by the USB to SATA adapter. I've been doing that for the last 6 months or so without issue using a cheap 128GB SSD off of my internal USB 2.0 port.

 

[jtrainer01]

OK, so going the simplest/cheapest route on SSD is adequate then. Gotcha, maybe I'm overthinking it a bit then. I'll look at some sort of mirrored SSD config just in case. Its the storage drives that need all the performance/balanced power/balanced cost.

So to expand on my needs, I'd like to know what it is about the USB thumb drives that seem to corrupt them so fast, any insight would be greatly appreciated, maybe I can unbrick one...