Need advice installing to USB

[tenknas]

I know some of you are tired of this discussion but hear me out.

My usecase involves not building our own NAS servers but renting out storage servers from Hetzner. Our infrastructure is all on Hetzner servers so we can't really move them out. Our current storage solution is very rugged with just SMB on each storage server and that's kinda getting hard to handle storage requirements and Truenas Scale will be a godsend.

Now about the USB installation, currently the storage servers at hetzner is only available with the default config which has a bunch of HDDs and 2 x NVMe drives. We plan to use the 2xNVMe drive as cache drives and we think a 1TB+ NVMe Drive is a waste for just the OS. There is no way for us to add an SSD boot device, Ive ask them a few times already. They said its already maxed out. They, however, allow adding USB drives to the server at minimal monthly cost. So I figured, why not install the OS to 2 x USB drives on RAID 1?

I've read a few discussion on this forum about installing truenas/freenas on a USB, but no one really mentioned doing it on a RAID 1 USB flash drive. Seems the consensus was to avoid it but there are some that say its possible if we move the System Data Sets to the main ZFS pool created on truenas.

I would really love someone's opinion on the matter.

Another thought is that, is it possible to first create the zpool then install the OS on that zpool?


Note: Ive read the following threads

USB not recommended? SSD are for boot/operating system?

Hi Guys, A buddy of mine pointed this out in the release notes for 11.2 U4: [NAS-101056] – Clarify that USB is not recommended as the operating system device in Guide First off, when did FreeNAS stop loading the OS into memory and started using Operating System devices? I must have missed...

www.truenas.com

FreeNAS destroyes USB Sticks and SSD's frequently

Hello, I have been using FreeNAS for over 3 years now and the death rate of my boot drives is very high. I have done some counting and want to present the results. I started off by using USB sticks as boot drives for FreeNAS (started with 9.2) and later switched to SSD's since it is recommended...

www.truenas.com

 

[sretalla]

Another thought is that, is it possible to first create the zpool then install the OS on that zpool?

If you don't care about being supported (wanting to use USB sticks puts you close to that position anyway), consider looking at this:https://www.truenas.com/community/t...-of-larger-ssds-for-boot-pool-and-data.81409/

I've read a few discussion on this forum about installing truenas/freenas on a USB, but no one really mentioned doing it on a RAID 1 USB flash drive

Plenty of people (including me in the past) have run USB sticks in mirrors as the boot pool... still problematic as they will fail around the same time usually given identical wear and hardware, but also incredibly difficult to identify which one failed and remove only that one.

Still far preferable would be a small USB to SSD or NVME adapter rather than a stick.

 

[tenknas]

If you don't care about being supported (wanting to use USB sticks puts you close to that position anyway), consider looking at this:https://www.truenas.com/community/t...-of-larger-ssds-for-boot-pool-and-data.81409/


Plenty of people (including me in the past) have run USB sticks in mirrors as the boot pool... still problematic as they will fail around the same time usually given identical wear and hardware, but also incredibly difficult to identify which one failed and remove only that one.

Still far preferable would be a small USB to SSD or NVME adapter rather than a stick.

If only it were possible with the current host we would opt for an ssd. Thanks for your input.

 

[NugentS]

If you do then:
1. Use USB 2.0 drives if you can
2. Use two different USB drives, from different manufacturers
3. As has been mentioned a M.2 stick + USB adapter (such as: USB Stick) would be better. Its just a long USB flash drive
4. Make sure the system dataset is NOT on the USB drives

 

[tenknas]

1. Use USB 2.0 drives if you can
2. Use two different USB drives, from different manufacturers
3. As has been mentioned a M.2 stick + USB adapter (such as: USB Stick) would be better. Its just a long USB flash drive
4. Make sure the system dataset is NOT on the USB drives

Thanks. Just want to reiterate, this is on a web hosting service that doesnt have much other options but the default config of the storage server and adding a number of 16gb usb drives.