Thoughts on jails/syslog on seperate usb stick

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

Hi everyone,

I'm thinking of moving my FreeNAS jails to a separate usb stick along with the syslog. My reason to do this is because I would like for my nas to be able to spin the drives down for extended periods of time.

Unfortunately I am out of sata ports, so just putting a small drive/ssd is not an option at the moment. So I was thinking of popping a 64 gig usb stick in the system and using that.

Has anybody tried this? and is it a crazy idea?

If usb is a bad idea what would be an option for a simple sata controller (2 ports or so)? I can't afford an IBM M1015 since they are crazy expensive where I live.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm guessing you've heard my resoning for not spinning down disks, and I'll assume you prefer to do it anyway.

I think that a USB stick is a bad idea. The jails will have their own logging and such, so a USB stick just isn't a very good idea.

To be honest, if you aren't planning to do speed records, you might be able to go with a USB hard drive. Just keep in mind that thing could go south without warning. Ideally make sure you can do SMART monitoring and testing on it, or return it for a different model. I know that a friend has one of http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178356 and it DOES support SMART monitoring and testing. As a backup plan, you could do snapshot/replication to your primary pool. ;)

As for 2-port SATA, I have no immediate recommendations. Many of those people end up with m1015s anyway because the 2-porters just suck in the reliability arena.

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

I agree with your reasoning on not spinning down disks, which is all fine a good in the US where power costs nothing. But here it will make a huge difference in operating costs.

So I wind back at the original problem, get the 6 big power hungry disks to spin down. If I could make the system enter C3 state I would do that as well.

I only need my FreeNAS occasionally and therefore it makes sense to conserve power, this is probably true for many FreeNAS installations at home.

But since I want jails ands syslog it means that I have to have someplace to put it and I'm fresh out of sata ports.

 

[TheSmoker]

Get something like this: http://www.delock.de/produkte/F_322_SATA---eSATA_89302/merkmale.html
Put a msata small ssd on it amd use it for jails/logs. I use one in my freenas. I use it for more than 2 years now (not powered down) and had no problems whatsoever. If you let it unconfigurred sata ports will be configured as ahci.