USB 2 or 3 or SSD for FreeNAS?

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Xtreme Gamer

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Oct 19, 2016
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I am not sure on which to go with on this. For FreeNAS boot drive, should I go USB 2 or 3, or should I go with a low capacity SSD? The guy in this video:
https://youtu.be/GUJ7jDRzie8

says he went with an SSD for boot drive (unless I misheard/misunderstood him and he said something else) so this plex server plugin wouldn't be bottlenecked from high usage. Can someone please confirm this for me? also, for the plugins/jails in FreeNAS. Are they all stored in the boot drive or are they stored in the actual storage hard drives? Because I have no idea how big the plugins/jails are in size so I'm not sure on what capacity I should go with if they are all stored in the boot drive. Thanks for the help guys!!!!
 
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m0nkey_

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Oct 27, 2015
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USB drives will be fine for the OS. Plex would be unaffected by your choice of boot drive.
 

wblock

Documentation Engineer
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Nov 14, 2014
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An SSD is faster and usually has less of the lifespan issues of USB drives. You can look for a low-capacity one, but 120G SSDs are cheap and some of the excess capacity can be used for overprovisioning.
 

danb35

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SSDs are better than USB sticks in every way but two: (1) they take a SATA port, and (2) you have to find a place to put them. On the first point, if your SATA ports are already used with hard drives, it isn't worth buying an HBA just to free up a port for the SSD; use a USB stick (or two) instead. On the second, it's easy enough to just velcro them to a case wall.

The OS doesn't take much space at all; even a 30 GB SSD is quite a bit more than is needed. A larger drive won't hurt anything, but it also won't really help anything. Your jails (including plugins) go on your data pool by default, and aren't on your boot device in any event.
 
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