Switching to a Mirrored Boot Drive

[NASbox]

I'm running FreeNAS 11.1-U7 (likely 11.2-U7 or later by the time I get around to making changes) on a cheap 120GB HP S700 SSD. Now that the price of SSDs has dropped to about what decent flash drives used to cost, I was thinking it might not be a bad idea to mirror my boot SSD (which also contains the system dataset).

Is this easy to do? Do I have to reinstall FreeNAS from scratch, or can I just plug in a second SSD and do something (either from the command line or the GUI and turn a single disk pool into a mirrored pool?

I noticed that I can get a Lexar NS100 120GB SATA III (LNS100-120RBNA) really cheap - is there any reason not to pair it with the existing HP SSD S700 (2DP97AA#ABC)? Both drives are very mediocre performers, but IIUC high performace doesn't really matter. In 2 years running time based on the smart data, the existing S700 drive has about 4GB written, so endurance isn't a big deal either.

Any comments/suggestions are appreciated.

 

[diedrichg]

Yes, you can just pop it in and then go through the GUI to tell it to use the new drive in a mirror. I actually did this process in reverse a few years ago and it was painless. I don't know where to go in the GUI though, just letting you know it should be simple.

 

[joeschmuck]

Look in the user guide, I believe it will have what you need to mirror the drive. I guess I have a question for you... Why make the change? I say this with love "If it works, don't break it". But sometimes we all like to play.

I don't see any warning flags with adding a generic SSD, the only catch would be if the new drive is smaller than the original drive but that doesn't seem to be the case, the first is 120GB, the new would be 128GB. It "should" work, but I haven't personally done it. Most people would mirror same sized drives but adding larger is generally not an issue.

 

[NASbox]

Yes, you can just pop it in and then go through the GUI to tell it to use the new drive in a mirror. I actually did this process in reverse a few years ago and it was painless. I don't know where to go in the GUI though, just letting you know it should be simple.

Look in the user guide, I believe it will have what you need to mirror the drive.

Thanks guys- got it... wanted confirmation that it was simple an sstright forward, and it appears to be super low risk.

I guess I have a question for you... But sometimes we all like to play. Why make the change? I say this with love "If it works, don't break it"

I tend to agree with you on the "If it works, don't break it" sentiment, and I am very slow to take the updates unless there is a very compelling reason to do so. I'm just getting ready to go from 11.1-U7 to 11.2-U7. Given the very low usage rate I don't know how likely the existing SSD is to fail. It certainly won't fail due to workload, at the current usage rate, it wouldn't hit the rated TBW in a couple of centuries!

Having said that, components fail, and based on my experience in the past it is a pretty low stress event to pop in another drive and "click replace". For a boot drive I wouldn't bother to make a special trip to the store for a replacement, I would just go next time I am "in the area". For $25 (a third of what I paid for the existing drive), it is cheap insurance to prevent downtime. About 3 or 4 years ago I had a boot Flash drive fail, and it was a bit of a pain as I had to spend time choosing a replacement, going to the store, pulling the box out and then doing a complete reinstallation. It essentially wiped out the best part of a day.

Am I missing something?

I need to replace a fan, and maybe do a quick bit of cleaning with compressed air, so I though I would just pop in a second drive while I had the box open on the bench. I don't plan on bringing the system down just to add a mirror to the boot drive.

I don't see any warning flags with adding a generic SSD, the only catch would be if the new drive is smaller than the original drive but that doesn't seem to be the case, the first is 120GB, the new would be 128GB. It "should" work, but I haven't personally done it. Most people would mirror same sized drives but adding larger is generally not an issue.

The S700 is also a "generic SSD", and based on benchmarks a 3rd quartile performer. I noticed that there is also an AData SU650 for the same price. I though Lexar was a "good brand", but since my original post I just noticed that they were recently bought out by a Chineese company, so that might mean the quality isn't still there (don't know... the drive doesn't seem to be in the benchmarks, and google doesn't return anything useful about it. Reviews on Amazon are for the most part positive, and many of them seem to be average users saying that it made their windows system run much faster. A weeks use on windows is like a few decaddes of use as a FreeNAS boot drive!

They are nominally the same size, and when the drive was created, there was a 2GB swap partition (which I later remeoved and left as unallocated space, so I should be OK with minor differences.