USB Boot drives keep failing

[Hawkevilcat]

Wondering is anyone else is having this issue. Initially I only used 1 boot drive. But it would fail anywhere from 1 week to 3 months. After I lost 5 USB sticks withing 6 months, I started mirroring my boot drives. I suspected maybe my motherboard, but this was replaced 6 months ago. I have lost 3 USB sticks since then. Mostly I have lost SanDisks, but I started buying the cheapest ones I could get because I keep going through them. Both motherboards are ASUS.

 

[Ericloewe]

Two universal things: USB drives are crap and users not searching the forum and thus not finding the exact same question, asked and answered less than 24 hours ago.

 

[pschatz100]

If you search through the forums, you will find lots of references to problems with USB thumb drives. Even the best ones are not reliable over the long term as a boot device. And you make your problem worse by buying cheap ones.

Newer versions of FreeBSD are harder on the boot devices than older versions were. Your best best would be to purchase a small SSD as a boot device. They are cheap enough. If you must use a thumb drive, plug it into a USB2 port. It will probably work better for a longer period of time, but it will still fail at some point.

I changed from thumbdrives to an SSD about a year ago.

 

[Alecmascot]

Are you saving the system dataset to the boot device along with the Reporting Database ?

 

[pschatz100]

Are you saving the system dataset to the boot device along with the Reporting Database ?

No. The system dataset is on one of my data volumes.

But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. For whatever reason, when FreeNAS migrated to version 11, booting off thumb drives became more troublesome. Searching through the posts will make this clear.

 

[Ericloewe]

Install sizes have been creeping out since 9.3 was released. That helps.