USB boots ok - but no option to install on HDD

[scenge]

USB boots ok - but no option to install on HDD

HP Microserver N54
8GB RAM
4 x internal 4TB HDD's - unformatted
1 x internal 128GB SSD HDD on optical sata cable
Goal is to install FreeNAS onto the internal SSD and boot from there.
Created boot USB ok using FreeNAS-8.3.1-RELEASE-p2-x64.img Using Keka and dd on an OS X System
Boots ok from USB stick
can access config web page via IP ok
Monitor attached to N54 shows an 11 item 'Console setup' list focusing on network interface config options
eg: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Initial_Setup
What i don't see is the 4 item GUI for installing onto the HDD with the 'install/Upgrade'option
eg: figure 2.3a: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Installing_from_CDROM
Some questions:
1. Do I need to download the CD iso instead (ie create boot USB from this, no optical drive at hand)?
2. Do I need to format the HDD I want to install on first?
I can get into shell and /etc and use ./netcli which then shows me the 11 item 'Console setup' ok
3. How can I get via shell to run the 4 item GUI for installing onto the HDD?
4. can I install to SSD from web config page?

 

[pirateghost]

A. Use the CD to install to the SSD (although, installing to SSD is a waste)
B. Insert the SSD into another computer (or connect via USB ext, etc) and use dd on it the same way you did with the USB

You dont see the install option because you already installed it to the USB. The recommendation is to just use the USB...what is your need for wasting a 128gb SSD?

 

[Egghead]

I concor with Pirateghost - use the USB stick to boot FreeNAS. The SSD could be used for ZIL and/or L2ARC, it will improve your built overall performance. To be safe, you could add an identical SSD and mirror it to the other one.

 

[coatmaker618]

I think the confusion comes from people (myself included) making the assumption that this is more of a standard OS where the user will be doing heavy I/O and program installations and such changes that require a fair amount of writing/changing data along with expecting it to be larger than it is (or to quickly/eventually grow to 100s of GB, as OSes are known to do).

Once you realize there's very little (apart from changing settings) that you do in the operating system, it almost makes more sense to think of it as a program that happens to run assembly instead of a modern operating system. Meaning that, you really aren't installing programs on top of this, you're running it directly (apart from a few plug-ins, which are largely the same)

As to EggHead's point, wouldn't it make more sense to just backup the settings for the FreeNAS setup? I don't know if there's an automated way to do that (which would be awesome, having an up to date settings file you can load in case of OS failure) so maybe that's the benefit of RAID, but as has been pointed out, FreeNAS doesn't really require a full storage drive and doesn't do enough I/O to require a SSD on PCIe/SATA connector.