Required USB performance for FreeNAS

[pie3]

Hi there,

I'm currently running FreeNAS 8.2.X RC1 off a 32MbitRead/16MbitWrite 16GB USB stick, but after realizing there's no possible way I could use the remaining 14GB for jails or something like that, I thought about replacing the 16 GB stick with a 8GB stick (lowest I have), but it's performance is 16MbitRead/8MbitWrite, something like that.

So I'm wondering what the minimum performance for a USB stick has to be running FreeNAS.
I really don't want FreeNAS beeing highly unresponsive in regular runtime.

Thanks for any replies in advance.
pie3

 

[praecorloth]

I couldn't give you any hard numbers, but I've run FreeNAS off of some pretty cheap thumb drives. I have to imagine I've come across drives that have performance similar to your 8GB drive. Haven't had any trouble yet. Give it a whirl. Worst case scenario, you'll find out pretty quickly that performance is not what you want, and you go back to your 16GB.

 

[pie3]

I tried, kinda hard to judge and I'm currently not in the mood trying out all possible things that could be effected/slow down.
Any better insights to this? - What activity would cause higher I/O load on the FreeNAS drive?

 

[ben]

The USB drive is hardly touched at all, mostly just for logs. The OS is read into memory on boot.

 

[pie3]

Thanks, that clears things up.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, you don't really need to worry. It's running "mostly" in memory. Our old storage servers boot off flash in USB1.1 host ports. Takes a bit to boot but works fine. Takes like a half hour or so to install though!

 

[survive]

Hi pie3,

The only time you will notice any extra speed from a fast USB key is when you boot. FreeNAS tries to minimize any writes to flash once the system is up to prevent the device from "wearing out" due to a bunch of disk activity.

Unfortunately there's no way to get at any extra space on a 4+GB flash device because FreeNAS uses all 4 partitions available to a drive that uses MBR partition tables.

-Will