SOLVED installation device truenas

[Paul042020]

Hi,
I have a question about the hardware requirements of the installation device.
It is highly recommended not to use a usb key as a boot device.
I am currently with freenas 9.3 which has been booting from a usb key for 5-6 years. I want to do a new installation with truenas on a small ssd.
Out of curiosity, why not a usb stick?
When I look at the dashboard of freenas 9.3, outside of the boot phases (4-5 times/year) there is no read/write on my boot device. Or I don't see them.
Have things changed between freenas 9.3 and truenas 12/13?
Are there regular read/write phases performed on boot device?

 

[sretalla]

Out of curiosity, why not a usb stick?

I am currently with freenas 9.3 which has been booting from a usb key for 5-6 years.

Freenas 9.3 booted to RAM and then didn't touch the USB stick after that.

After that version (9.10 and newer), booting is done directly and the boot stick gets a lot more load, so a big increase was noticed in the failure of USB boot media in all versions from 9.10 forward, hence the change to the recommendation.

When I look at the dashboard of freenas 9.3, outside of the boot phases (4-5 times/year) there is no read/write on my boot device. Or I don't see them.
Have things changed between freenas 9.3 and truenas 12/13?
Are there regular read/write phases performed on boot device?

Answered with the above.

 

[Paul042020]

Ok, thanks you.
so indeed if the new freenas/truenas versions now require the boot device, I understand the recommendation.
Do you know what kind of data is read/written (logs,...)?
(I don't have a system at hand at the moment)

 

[sretalla]

I haven't looked into that in detail, but the system dataset takes the majority of the writes and that will be by default on your data pool as soon as you have one, so it shouldn't be things like logs and rrd data since those are in the system dataset... whatever temporary files are written would possibly be the bulk of it.

 

[danb35]

Freenas 9.3 booted to RAM and then didn't touch the USB stick after that.

No it didn't; 9.3 was the first release to use a live ZFS pool for the boot device.

 

[sretalla]

No it didn't; 9.3 was the first release to use a live ZFS pool for the boot device.

I (at least used to) think that I started using FreeNAS at 9.3 and I have worked with the re-mounting of the root fs to do some early hacking to try to change monitoring at one point, so I had always thought 9.3 still had the RAMdisk, but if you're telling me my memory sucks, fair enough, I think I moved to 9.10 a couple of moths after starting, so I really don't know anymore.

 

[Paul042020]

What do you mean by using an active ZFS pool for the boot device.
On my installation, except for the "datasat system" part, deported to the datapool, I had no read/write on the boot device (The times I looked at the graph). I would look again