Moving boot from usb to ssd

giacombum

Explorer
Joined
Jul 18, 2017
Messages
61
Hello,

After experiencing an high failure rate of USB sticks, I decided to move my boot pool to SSDs, but I have a couple of questions:
1) I'm using 64GB USB drives, should I use SSDs of the same or bigger capacity, right? I cannot use, for instance, a 32 GB SSD.
2) Which SSDs are recommended? Can I use SSDs with sata-usb3 adapter and connect the SSDs to the USB3 external ports? Or is better to avoid such devices? And what about PCI to m2 adapters?

Thanks in advance!
 

Alecmascot

Guru
Joined
Mar 18, 2014
Messages
1,175
I use 32GB SSD MSATA in a PCI-E adapter like this.
M-SATA Adapter
I have this in 3 servers running for more than 3 years now.
Each boot image uses about 1GB.
 

Samuel Tai

Never underestimate your own stupidity
Moderator
Joined
Apr 24, 2020
Messages
5,399
The minimum recommended size for a boot pool device is 16 GB. I use USB3->M.2 adapters for both of mine, as my system is out of SATA ports.
 

jlpellet

Patron
Joined
Mar 21, 2012
Messages
286
I have had good results from small SSD's (32-128GB) in various USB external enclosures attached to USB 2 ports. On USB 3 motherboard ports, I have repeated issues accross several systems with upgrades not properly creating the new boot parition after the FreeBSD move away from GRUB. Running on USB 2 ports, on the same systems, have had no issues. Good luck.
 

giacombum

Explorer
Joined
Jul 18, 2017
Messages
61
Thank you for your replies! So, I'll try to stau away from USB3 anyway...
I don't remember how many PCI available I've on my motherboard, anyway recently I purchased a PCI-SATA adapter, so I can try to use it together with the SSDs: it has 4 SATA ports and I've planned to add just 1 HDD, so I still have 3 spare ports. What do you think? Or is better to use PCI->M.2 adapters?
 
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