Much said about not running in virtual machine but...

[Rocky]

Greetings,

See warnings about not running on a virtual machine - I can appreciate the reasoning. However there isn't a mechanism that I've seen to install FreeNAS on the hard drive - no way to create partitions during installation.

Several say to use thumbdrive - but my experience with thumbdrives is that while they are convenient, they aren't reliable and they are slow. I don't trust them in a production environment.

Is there a way to carve out say a 8 - 10G partition and install FreeNAS to it? (Yes - I know I could boot up from a Live distro of unix...)

 

[pirateghost]

No. You should read the documentation and understand the reason for using a thumb drive

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

[Rocky]

I understand the reasoning - I just don't trust them - they fail way too often.

 

[pirateghost]

I understand the reasoning - I just don't trust them - they fail way too often.

They fail often if you are constantly writing to them. For the most part your freenas thumb drive remains in a mostly read only state. You can waste an entire drive if you want but it is not worth it. It takes 10 minutes to recover from a failed USB anyway. Keep backups of the config and a spare USB drive ready to go.

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

[Rocky]

Thanks for your input. Too bad you couldn't create two 8 GB partitions on a hard drive - one for running, one for upgrade... with the size of drives nobody's going to miss 16 GB of disk. Perhaps I'll grab an old IDE card and old drive and put in the machine - they're sitting around collecting dust anyway.... :)

 

[Rocky]

I understand the gotchas of setting aside the aforementioned partitions when using software RAID and I can appreciate that... there are times where RAID provided by the hardware or SAN comes in handy.... which I have neither in this case... SAN would be easy - carve out a 8 GB LUN for FreeNAS and off to the races...

 

[cyberjock]

You can't carve out 2 partitions for FreeNAS because FreeNAS uses 4 partitions. That is precisely why you can't use any FreeNAS boot disk's unused space.

If you search around many people have the same concern. But if you use a name brand USB stick they can last quite a while. I've setup several machines with Corsair Voyagers and never had a failure in up to 2 years of uptime.

 

[Rocky]

Interesting - documentation says "The FreeNAS® installation will partition the operating system drive into two partitions. One partition holds the current operating system and the other partition is used when you upgrade. This allows you to
safely upgrade to a new image or to revert to an older image should you encounter problems.

Same thing though - not hard to create 4 partitions... but I *do* understand the logistical problems doing so would require and understand the reasoning...

 

[cyberjock]

FreeNAS is designed and engineered with the concept of software as an appliance. Just like ESXi can run from USB stick, FreeNAS can run from USB stick. In fact, from what I've read both people make the same recommendations for the same reasons.

Can you choose to install to a hard drive? Sure can.

Do I think it's a smart choice? Definitely not.

Do you think it's a smart choice? Sounds like it.

So are you wrong? No.

Am I wrong? No.

It's just about knowing and experience. I can tell you from my personal experience I'd have no reason to be concerned about a USB stick failing. If I were going to put my server in a colo 1000 miles from the office and it would be extremely expensive and inconvenient to try to replace a failed USB stick I'd probably buy the smallest Intel "premium" drive I could buy and use that. It's internal so you don't have some jerk-off that breaks off your USB stick on accident and Intel's 0.4% annual failure rate is probably statistically lower than USB sticks. I've owned 5 Intel SSDs for almost 20 computing years. Not one failure and despite using them daily(some never turning them off) none of them are below 100% drive life remaining. So what's the odds that FreeNAS has a chance in our lifetime of wearing out an Intel SSD? About as close to zero as you can get.

Some people even buy those internal USB header converters and plug in 2 or 3 USBs as spares so that *if* they had a failure they just reinstall FreeNAS over IPMI and change the boot device.

 

[Rocky]

I'd have no issue with SSD - just not Thumbdrives (which is what I associate flash drives with) - but there's a good mix of inexpensive and reliability with disk drives - more reliable than thumbdrives but cheaper than SSD.

I go through about 2 thumb drives a year - granted they aren't used in the same manner it would be in a server environment such as this. More of a constant inserting and removing - copying files to and from.... and often not very high grade thumb drives (Sandisk fail on me more than any other by a substantial margin). The free ones I get from vendors tend to work the best...

BTW - thanks for your guide! Helpful! :)