SanDisk Cruzer Fit Boot Problems

[Robert Trevellyan]

I think moving .system and the reporting data off the boot pool helps.

 

[jgreco]

I am amazed that anybody still asks about the reliability of USB flash drives. There are posts dating all the way back to the earliest days of this forum, suggesting that flash drives are not particularly reliable. However, the real key to head-ache free operation is to make certain you keep backups of your Freenas configuration. Replacing a bad flash drive is annoying - but not the end of the world as long as you have a backup of your configuration.

It certainly CAN be the end of the world. Once you start doing something with the filer that isn't trite, such as using it to serve up VM data, loss of the underlying storage can be very bad for your VM's... and when a USB flash drive corrupts, it can certainly take your filer sideways or down entirely, which takes the VM environment with it. All due to a stupid PoS flash drive.

 

[Arwen]

Another thought about older FreeNAS boot devices which used UFS. We would not know
about un-reported bit flips. ZFS with checksumming lets us KNOW about ALL of them,
even if it can't correct them, (un-mirrored).

UFS may not let you know about transport errors, (perhaps caused by USB bus). Or bad
blocks that aren't properly reported by the block read. All depends on if the read had some
other check in it. (For example reading a block pointer than then points to a block not
possible on a smaller flash drive, would likely get reported as read block out of range.)

So ZFS could be finding a pre-existing problem, that USB manufacturers have gotten away
with due to lack of checks.

Glad my FreeNAS Mini came with a SATA DOM, and that I later bought a mirror SATA DOM.

 

[gpsguy]

*I* think the use of USB flash drives was a reasonable solution for home users in the 8.0 - 9.2.1.x days.

With a fixed image as small as ~2GB using a 250GB boot disk only gave one reliability. The rest of the space wasn't usable.

For @jgreco, using his little N36L in a commercial environment, it made sense to add a hardware RAID card and have mirrored boot environment.

Fast forward to the 9.3 days. Hardware like SSD's are much cheaper. With ZFS and the ability to store other stuff including multiple boot environments on the boot device adding a small SSD or DOM makes a lot more sense- even for the home user.


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[TAC]

I've been trying to clone my 16 GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit (CZ33) USB drive in my machine with no luck. I've Wiped and attempted to Attach another of the exact same USB drives and get the not enough room message (see my other post if you want more info).

If I pickup a couple Intel 320 SSD 40 GB SSD off eBay should it be as straight forward as plugging the first SSD to my system, running Wipe and Attaching to clone my current 16 GB Cruzer Fit USB drive?

Should I then be able to unplug the 16 SanDisk USB drive and plug in the second SSD, Wipe and Attach and be good to go?

 

[gpsguy]

I would backup/save your configuration file and do a fresh install of FreeNAS and select both disks for the installation. Once installed, restore your old configuration.


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[TAC]

SSD have been ordered!

So with the boot drive cloned (mirrored) I assume FreeNAS will always run off one drive and if that drive fails it will automagially jump to the other drive and keep going while alerting you to replace the failed drive? Also, as updates are made to the mirrored drive, if it fails you also get an alert.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

if that drive fails it will automagially jump to the other drive

Not necessarily, that's up to the BIOS. Having mirrored boot devices just means you can recover more quickly than if you had to reinstall and then restore a saved configuration.

if it fails you also get an alert.

If a scrub finds errors you get notified, assuming you have scrubs enabled on the boot volume.

 

[Arwen]

TAC,
Sounds like your second USB drive was slightly smaller than the current.
Typical problem when adding a mirror. Backing up your config and
re-installing FreeNAS to both is one solution. (Then restoring your config.)

You can have the same problem with SSDs, and SATA DOMs, (which are
also SSDs). Their are basically no standard sizes.

 

[TAC]

TAC,
Sounds like your second USB drive was slightly smaller than the current.
Typical problem when adding a mirror. Backing up your config and
re-installing FreeNAS to both is one solution. (Then restoring your config.)

You can have the same problem with SSDs, and SATA DOMs, (which are
also SSDs). Their are basically no standard sizes.

Jeez after going to all the trouble of finding the exact same model of USB drive. ;-) Although a little more hassle the re-install and restore backup is the most versatile way to go.

To install FreeNAS to a USB drive does that have to be done by copying a FreeNAS ISO to the USB drive? I assume this is the case since when messing around on a second FreeNAS box, if installing from a CD-ROM the install procedure only lists 3 HDs and doesn't show the USB Drive as an option. The BIOS shows all 3 HDs and the USB drives so it knows they exist.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

To install FreeNAS to a USB drive does that have to be done by copying a FreeNAS ISO to the USB drive?

You need to install either from a CD or from another USB drive. It's covered in the documentation.

 

[Chris Moore]

I run a pair of mirrored 40GB drives in one of my FreeNAS systems. I had been in the unit to work on something and afterward the BIOS didn't want to boot unless I went into the BIOS and selected the drive to boot from. It took me a little time to figure out I had accidentally left one of the two boot disks disconnected. FreeNAS would still work perfectly once I manually selected the boot drive in the BIOS, but the BIOS didn't want to let me boot because the disk it thought it was supposed to boot from was not detected.

A lot depends on the BIOS (UEFI) configuration and what your options are when you set it up. Can you set your system to try one disk and if it fails, then try another disk, but ignore all those data disks over there?

I need to work on mine but I don't want to shut the server down to do it.

 

[wreedps]

Ive been having a bunch of Sandisk Fit fail lately. I am going to try the SSD approach now.