Recommendations for USB drives (boot disks)?

[taupehat]

So far three out of the four USB drives we were using as boot volumes have failed in the past two months. Given that they're all failing at more or less the same time I'm investigating whether there is excessive writing to these volumes. The system dataset is on the spinny drives so that's not the issue.

Anyhow, we were using Samsung FIT drives, but if anyone out there has a recommendation for other USB drives with good reliability, I'm all ears. Also any tips on what else could be doing constant writes to /boot would be welcome.

 

[Johnnie Black]

I use Kingston 2.0 USB drives, like the DTSE9H or DTM, and never had to replace one, latter one I believe is EOL but the other one is still available, though avoid any USB 3.0 models like the DTSE9G2 as in my experience those are much more prone to fail.

 

[taupehat]

Johnnie, what kind of life expectancy are you seeing from those?

 

[Chris Moore]

Anyhow, we were using Samsung FIT drives, but if anyone out there has a recommendation for other USB drives with good reliability, I'm all ears. Also any tips on what else could be doing constant writes to /boot would be welcome.

If you have a way to mount it / connect it, I would suggest using a SSD instead. I don't know what your hardware is, so I am shooting in the dark, but I am using old 40 GB laptop hard drives in both of my home NAS systems (in mirrored pairs) and that has worked very reliably for almost two years now. I also built a couple FreeNAS systems at work using SSD boot drives and I am very much liking those. The drives don't need to be big or fast, so the oldest, slowest thing you can find is fine.

For example, you could throw one of these in there and it would probably outlast the useful life of the server:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/SanDisk-2-...6-0Gbps-HP-680675-001-724416-001/163051680337

 

[Chris Moore]

PS. Take a look at this: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/updated-forum-rules-4-11-17.45124/

 

[rvassar]

I had really bad luck with USB thumb drives, I went thru several in less than 8 weeks. I think some of it was cheap drives, but the system host controller appeared to be a factor. I have successfully used USB thumb drives on other FreeNAS builds. Several of the failed thumb drives appeared to pass testing on a Linux system, post failure. But after some attempts at using them in non-FreeNAS duty, they are in fact unstable, corrupt data, and throw write errors.

I finally gave up on them and moved to a 60Gb SSD in a USB enclosure, and started collecting parts to build a proper small NAS. Oddly enough, my current boot pool is the 60Gb SSD (onboard SATA attached), mirrored with a 64Gb Samsung FIT USB. I don't really know why I bothered to mirror it like this, but... No trouble so far. I think I'm trying to prove to myself the other chassis & cheap thumb drives were the culprit, but... It will be statistically insignificant either way.

I'm using a Patriot Flare, which Fry's sells for $32 these days. I have caught these on sale for as little as $19.

https://www.frys.com/product/9425721

 

[taupehat]

PS. Take a look at this: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/updated-forum-rules-4-11-17.45124/

What'd I miss?

 

[rvassar]

What'd I miss?

I'll offer a guess of "search topic before posting".

 

[taupehat]

I'll offer a guess of "search topic before posting".

Oh. I did that though. The only thing I found interesting was that perhaps my drives are failing because of atime updates, which is indeed interesting but I still like hearing from folks on what USB drives they are currently using.

 

[Johnnie Black]

Johnnie, what kind of life expectancy are you seeing from those?

I never replaced one in either of my FreeNAS servers, which granted are not that old, about 1 and half years, also use similar flash drives with Unraid and also never replaced one, and some are over 10 years old now, though flash drives have less used with it.

 

[Chris Moore]

What'd I miss?

Also, possibly the part about what hardware you have now.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[taupehat]

Well, rats. Thought I had something exciting on my hands in terms of atime, but that's already been addressed:

Code:

freenas-boot/grub	   /boot/grub	  zfs	 rw,noatime	  1	   0

I'm leaning toward replacing these with SATA DOMs since the SM X10 series boards these run on have two 5V SATA ports. Sure, fixing means downtime but I'd hope that's not going to be as common as using consumer-grade flash drives for /boot would be.

 

[Chris Moore]

consumer-grade flash drives

Are plenty good enough, but if you want an 'enterprise' solution, these are more than up to the task:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-SSD-320-Series-40GB-2-5-SATA2-SSDSA2CT040G3-TESTED/192668786819

 

[Chris Moore]

So far three out of the four USB drives we were using as boot volumes have failed in the past two months. Given that they're all failing at more or less the same time I'm investigating whether there is excessive writing to these volumes.

Since you can't take the hint, I will ask. What version of FreeNAS are you using and what are the details of your hardware? These things are supposed to be stated in your post. That is why I pointed you at the rules.

 

[taupehat]

Since you can't take the hint

As I teach my children, if you want something ask directly. Part of that is my own blindness to "hints" and part of it is just me wanting them to learn to communicate clearly. I apologize for missing what you were asking.

Anyhow, we have multiple systems. The most common build looks like:
Build FreeNAS-11.1-U6
Platform Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v4 @ 2.10GHz
Memory 130924MB
DIMM Count 4
Motherboard Supermicro X10DRi-T4+
HBA LSI SAS 3108
Main Storage 24 HGST 4TB (HUS726040AL4210 or similar replacements) topology mirrored vdevs with spares
Log Storage 2 Samsung SSD 850 PRO 512GB overprovisioned down to 32GB for wear-leveling

As I say we have a few builds, but this is representative of the most common, and is the exact motherboard on which we've seen the USB disk failures.