Install FreeNAS 11 to SD Card?

[SpiritFly]

I've done a bit of searching around this forum and found a few threads discussing this, and my general conclusion was: not recommended because sd cards can wear faster, but will work.

The threads I've read were from around 2013 so I was wondering if this has changed maybe. Will FreeNAS work better with SD cards now? I'm asking because I have a HP Gen8 with internal SD Card slot and a spare Kingston 8GB, and I'm willing to experiment :)

Has anyone tried running FreeNAS from SD?

 

[m0nkey_]

While it is entirely possible to run FreeNAS from a SD Card, it's not recommended. SD Cards are known to fail very quickly when being used with FreeNAS. You're better off using two USB thumb drives (such as the SanDisk Ultra Fit) as a mirrored boot or a single small SSD. Using a SSD will be the most reliable of the two options. Using mirrored USB thumb drives is the second most favorable option as you do get some resiliency.

 

[SpiritFly]

Do you think a larger USB than 8GB will make a difference in terms of reliability and performance? Ideally I'd like to use a SATA SSD to boot FreeNAS, but I wouldn't like to occupy a slot in my 8 bay HP DL360e G8 server. I'm thinking whether I would be able to use the SATA slot for the optical drive. I guess I'll have to ask that in the HP forum.

 

[danb35]

Is the issue that you don't want the SSD taking up a drive bay, or that you don't want it taking a SATA port? If the former, you can mount it pretty much anywhere using Velcro or double-sided tape. Or you could use a SATA DOM (a bit more expensive, but doesn't require any mounting).

 

[SpiritFly]

Is the issue that you don't want the SSD taking up a drive bay, or that you don't want it taking a SATA port? If the former, you can mount it pretty much anywhere using Velcro or double-sided tape. Or you could use a SATA DOM (a bit more expensive, but doesn't require any mounting).

Yeah I don't want to take up a drive bay as I want to use all 8 bays for storage. I don't mind using hacks to mount it outside with a tape, but the thing is I cannot find a way to power up the sata hdd. The SATA DOM option seems perfect, but the powering issue still remains.

Then there is the Slimline SATA next to the SATA connector on my MB, which I think carries power as well, but I guess I will have to use a Slimline SATA to regular SATA adapter/cable to connect a SSD. But will it work fine?

http://prntscr.com/f5vgaf

 

[zoomzoom]

I personally wouldn't recommend using an SSD for a few reasons...

1. It's a waste, unless you have an older 32GB SSD that was used as a cache drive, as you'll never come close to filling up a 32GB thumb drive, let alone anything larger.
2. A SATA port is lost, as a FreeNAS boot drive is just that... a boot drive only, and it's is not accessible for anything else (FreeNAS runs from RAM, not from the drive it's installed to). This means the SSD will never achieve what an SSD is meant to achieve: performance exceeding that of a mechanical drive.
3. It's recommended to run the FreeNAS boot drive in a mirror configuration, and running two SSDs for this is truly inefficient, both from a drive perspective, as well as a SATA port persepctive =]

See this post from @danb35 and this post from @wblock ​

I personally would recommend staying away from the SanDisk UltraFits as:

• they have an extraordinarily high rate of failure when used for FreeNAS boot drives (leads to inevitable CAM status errors)
• quirks settings have never been quite right for them (leading to inevitable CAM status errors)
• they run extraordinarily hot, enough to burn if touched, of which probably has an impact on the high failure rate.

I've went through three sets of two 64GB Ultra Fits, and switched to two PNY 32GB USB3 Turbo Attache 3 drives after the third set failed as the previous two had. I've yet to have a single issue since switching to the PNY drives and they also run far cooler. There's no point to them having a plastic casing if they're installed internally, so I removed the casing and use an NZXT IU01 header expander since it has two USB ports on it.

• NZXT stopped production on the IU01 a few years back, so it's become harder to find sellers who still have stock, but there are other manufacturers out there with similar solutions if your motherboard doesn't have internal USB ports on the board (iXsystems uses similar hardware to run TrueNAS's boot drives on the C2750D4I). I know I've seen small PCB boards that plug directly into a USB header and have one to two USB ports on the opposite side of the board.

 

[danb35]

FreeNAS runs from RAM, not from the drive it's installed to

It's been years (since the release of 9.3) since that was true. Now that the boot device is a ZFS pool, the OS runs from the boot pool. ZFS caching means that most of it will be in RAM most of the time, but it isn't loaded into a ramdisk the way it once was.

It's recommended to run the FreeNAS boot drive in a mirror configuration

This is recommended only because the most common boot device is a USB stick, and USB sticks are extraordinarily crappy. If using any flavor of SSD, there's much less reason to mirror the boot device(s).

 

[zoomzoom]

@danb35 I didn't realize that, clearly missing that change =]. Since it is a pool now, would one gain any of the performance an SSD offers if one was used?

 

[SpiritFly]

I personally wouldn't recommend using an SSD for a few reasons...

1. It's a waste, unless you have an older 32GB SSD that was used as a cache drive, as you'll never come close to filling up a 32GB thumb drive, let alone anything larger.
2. A SATA port is lost, as a FreeNAS boot drive is just that... a boot drive only, and it's is not accessible for anything else (FreeNAS runs from RAM, not from the drive it's installed to). This means the SSD will never achieve what an SSD is meant to achieve: performance exceeding that of a mechanical drive.
3. It's recommended to run the FreeNAS boot drive in a mirror configuration, and running two SSDs for this is truly inefficient, both from a drive perspective, as well as a SATA port persepctive =]

I personally would recommend staying away from the SanDisk UltraFits as:

• they have an extraordinarily high rate of failure when used for FreeNAS boot drives (leads to inevitable CAM status errors)
• quirks settings have never been quite right for them (leading to inevitable CAM status errors)
• they run extraordinarily hot, enough to burn if touched, of which probably has an impact on the high failure rate.

I've went through three sets of two 64GB Ultra Fits, and switched to two PNY 32GB USB3 Turbo Attache 3 drives after the third set failed as the previous two had. I've yet to have a single issue since switching to the PNY drives and they also run far cooler. There's no point to them having a plastic casing if they're installed internally, so I removed the casing and use an NZXT IU01 header expander since it has two USB ports on it.

• NZXT stopped production on the IU01 a few years back, so it's become harder to find sellers who still have stock, but there are other manufacturers out there with similar solutions if your motherboard doesn't have internal USB ports on the board (iXsystems uses similar hardware to run TrueNAS's boot drives on the C2750D4I). I know I've seen small PCB boards that plug directly into a USB header and have one to two USB ports on the opposite side of the board.

I'm currently running FreeNAS from a 32GB Kingston USB Drive(forgot the exact model) for 3+ years externally on a HP Proliand DL160 G8, so far so good. Now I'm about to move to a HP DL360e which happens to have internal USB port and it is placed right in front of the cooler, but unfortunately it is only one port, not two. I'm wondering whether something like this would prove reliable for adding a second mirrored USB drive?

I still prefer to add a SATA SSD though, as I do have one spare laying around. It's a 60GB, but it isn't very fast and I don't have much use for it, so I'm thinking I should use it for FreeNAS boot installation. The only concern with going this route is whether I can use that Optical drive port on my DL360e G8 motherboard for connecting an SSD.

 

[zoomzoom]

@SpiritFly For the USB port, you may want to use a compact USB port expander for a laptop, which will likely have a 6 - 8" USB cord attached, if the USB drives would be too close to the cooler, otherwise something like the one in the link would work. As to the the OD, an SSD can be ran off it's SATA port, with the only downside in general being OD SATA ports are usually SATA 2, not SATA 3, limiting an SSD to ~250MBytes/s

 

[SpiritFly]

@SpiritFly For the USB port, you may want to use a compact USB port expander for a laptop, which will likely have a 6 - 8" USB cord attached, if the USB drives would be too close to the cooler, otherwise something like the one in the link would work. As to the the OD, an SSD can be ran off it's SATA port, with the only downside in general being OD SATA ports are usually SATA 2, not SATA 3, limiting an SSD to ~250MBytes/s

There is more than enough room for the two usb flash drives. The reason I mentioned the cooler being next to the USB Internal port was that it can be useful for cooling the flash drives. :)

Do you think if the SanDisk UltraFit are being constantly cooled(by being placed right in front of a cooler) would prove more reliable? I wouldn't want to obstruct the airflow by placing too big USB flash drives as the same cooler is blowing towards one of the CPUs with the internal USB port being right in it's path.

 

[zoomzoom]

@SpiritFly The heat is just one concern with Ultra Fits, and even if the heat was the only concern, there's no way to cool them. If you've never seen an Ultra Fit before, it has a ~1/3" plastic head that sticks out of the USB port and that's it. The part that gets insanely hot is the physical USB portion of it, and since the PCB in one is smaller than a nickel, there's simply no way to easily cool it. I love Ultra Fits due to their size and speed (150MB/s read), just not for FreeNAS boot drives =]

 

[Stux]

Anecdotally I haven't seen any issue with the half dozen USB Cruzer fits that I use...

Nothing says you can't mirror the SD card with a USB. Why not just use both and if/when you have an issue solve it then?

 

[SpiritFly]

Anecdotally I haven't seen any issue with the half dozen USB Cruzer fits that I use...

Nothing says you can't mirror the SD card with a USB. Why not just use both and if/when you have an issue solve it then?

That's the best suggestion I've seen! :) I will do that and see how it goes, I plan to run a month of test-drive anyhow so will see how this setup turns out.

 

[danb35]

Since it is a pool now, would one gain any of the performance an SSD offers if one was used?

The biggest place you'll see a performance improvement is during updates. Boot time will be better from an SSD than from a USB stick, but reads aren't usually too bad on USB sticks.

 

[wblock]

It's a waste, unless you have an older 32GB SSD that was used as a cache drive, as you'll never come close to filling up a 32GB thumb drive, let alone anything larger.

Extra capacity makes for longer life, because those extra cells are used for wear leveling. Forget the space issue, SSDs are not nearly as likely to fail as USB sticks.

A SATA port is lost, as a FreeNAS boot drive is just that... a boot drive only, and it's is not accessible for anything else (FreeNAS runs from RAM, not from the drive it's installed to). This means the SSD will never achieve what an SSD is meant to achieve: performance exceeding that of a mechanical drive.

FreeNAS has not run from RAM for the last few years. The boot drive is used as a system drive. An SSD as a boot drive is helpful not just because logging and other writes go faster, but because even cheap SSDs are more reliable than a USB stick.

 

[raidflex]

I have used the current USB stick in my FreeNAS server for 4 years without an issues. They are so cheap you can just replace them every once in a while anyways before they fail. I also backup my config on a regular basis in case of any issues. There should be very little writes to the USB aside from updates.