Recommendable USB thumb drives for freenas-boot pool?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Hi, guys,

bad luck today - my two mirrored system drives failed on the same day leaving the system completely broken. All data on the storage pool is of course intact.

I had used these drives:
https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00LFVISSY/

Investigating I found that they were awfully hot. I removed them and plugged them in a stock FreeBSD system to check - nothing but CAM timeouts.

Apart from "don't" ... any advice? I reinstalled on my internal SSD but that's a 240 GB PCIe card. Quite a waste just for the boot pool. Why does FreeNAS use the entire drive and not just, say, 16 GB of it leaving the rest usable for other purposes?

I used to buy "industrial grade" compact flash for my Soekris devices, never had one fail. Are there similar USB flash drives around?

Thanks,
Patrick

 

[danb35]

Why does FreeNAS use the entire drive and not just, say, 16 GB of it leaving the rest usable for other purposes?

The devs would have a more definite answer, but I expect the reason is historical--FreeNAS (even back in the 0.7 days) has always run on small flash devices, and until pretty recently it wouldn't be cost-effective to buy an oversized device. And to a degree, there's a benefit to using an oversized device (as @wblock often points out) due to wear leveling.

 

[MrToddsFriends]

Recommendable USB thumb drives for freenas-boot pool?

Before I switched to a mirror of two SanDisk X300s SSDs (64GB) for freenas-boot I used a mirror of two SanDisk UltraFit USB3.0 USB flash drives (SDCZ43-016G-G46, 16GB). Without any problem for around two years (maybe I was just lucky), no excessive heat ever noticed, system dataset of course not located on freenas-boot.

 

[wblock]

If you don't want them to get hot, don't use USB 3 drives. Some melt. The one I found that was good even in USB 3 mode was a Lexar S75. Other models got burning hot, and there were reports of some melting.

An SSD is the right device for a boot drive. Long-term cheaper and more reliable than a couple of high-quality USB sticks.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I ordered a couple of Sandisk Cruzer Fit, the USB 2.0 variant, to give USB one more try.

Indeed I installed a couple of FreeNAS systems for friends. The HP Microserver line features an USB socket inside the system - I always used this and haven't received any complaints, yet. Seems to be the 3.0 sticks that run too hot.

As for the SSD - yes, but there is no room for another cheap SATA SSD in my chassis and wasting a 240 GB PCIe card ...

Thanks,
Patrick

 

[SweetAndLow]

I have used 2 mirrored cruzer fits for 4 years now with zero problems. I also move my system dataset and rrd to my pool and off the USB.

 

[kskreider]

I had a mirrored pool of 32GB 3.0 Cruzer Fits for about a year and a half and one just failed. I accidentally re-ordered the 16GB 2.0 and cannot get it to work if my life depended on it. (Yes, I connected to the 2.0 jacks on the back my mobo instead of 3.0 on the front). I even tried the installer on a bootable CD and I just couldn't get anything to see the drives in the installation destination window.

I am just going to get another 32GB 3.0 Cruzer Fit and mirror my good one. Hopefully that works.