winnielinnie
MVP
- Joined
- Oct 22, 2019
- Messages
- 3,641
The title of this thread doesn't do the question justice, but in summary, let's say you have the following setup with your TrueNAS server:
So how is this risky or frowned upon? Barely any writes at all are done to your USB stick (no syslogs, no System Dataset, no swap), and if your USB ever fails, you only lose the OS, which is easy to bounce back from: Reinstall TrueNAS. Upload your config. Done. (You can even mirror your boot-pool with two USBs, and it still costs almost nothing.)
This frees up ports on your motherboard and/or controller, and means you needn't purchase an additional drive(s) just to use as a boot-pool for something that barely ever gets written to. Not to mention, less space is taken up inside the chassis in regards to drive bays and cages. Not to mention that even if you have m.2 slots for NVMe, they can be used for more practical benefits, such as SLOG or L2ARC or a dedicate "fast scratch" or jail pool, rather than wasted on a boot-pool. That's a big deal for home users.
I switched from using mirrored-USBs as my boot-pool to now using SSDs, but I realized it feels like a pointless waste since my System Dataset and syslogs are not even on my boot-pool!
It's like owning an expensive car, which you never drive, just so you can use the interior space to store some luggage.
Ouch!
- boot-pool (i.e, "OS") is installed to a USB stick
- No swap is used on the USB stick
- System Dataset is moved to your data-pool
- Syslogs are written to your System Dataset, which means they write to your data-pool
- Swap is used on your data drives (default 2GB)
- You regularly backup your config file and any encryption keyfiles
So how is this risky or frowned upon? Barely any writes at all are done to your USB stick (no syslogs, no System Dataset, no swap), and if your USB ever fails, you only lose the OS, which is easy to bounce back from: Reinstall TrueNAS. Upload your config. Done. (You can even mirror your boot-pool with two USBs, and it still costs almost nothing.)
This frees up ports on your motherboard and/or controller, and means you needn't purchase an additional drive(s) just to use as a boot-pool for something that barely ever gets written to. Not to mention, less space is taken up inside the chassis in regards to drive bays and cages. Not to mention that even if you have m.2 slots for NVMe, they can be used for more practical benefits, such as SLOG or L2ARC or a dedicate "fast scratch" or jail pool, rather than wasted on a boot-pool. That's a big deal for home users.
I switched from using mirrored-USBs as my boot-pool to now using SSDs, but I realized it feels like a pointless waste since my System Dataset and syslogs are not even on my boot-pool!
It's like owning an expensive car, which you never drive, just so you can use the interior space to store some luggage.
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