USB or Mobo failures?

[vilane]

Happy New Year my fellow FreeNAS'ers!

I'm planning on making some overhauls to my system when 10 drops into stable, but one current issue I've been running into that has me a little concerned is that intermittently, my USB boot media will show corruption/errors and it being unable to be accessed. Upon a reboot of the system, it fails to detect the media in the USB slot. So like a testing monkey that I am, I move the USB stick to a different port and reboot. The system then senses the USB media, but it is no longer the default boot option, so I have to manually tell it to boot to it. It then boots up normally and everything continues as it should (until the next time that I get an alert in my email that the boot media is having issues).

My mobo (ASRock E3C226D21 Mini ITX) doesn't really show any signs of failing beyond this USB shenanigans. The USB media in question is a Verbatim 8GB Store'n'go 97463, I've purchased probably 5 of them so far between having backups and swapping them around when I thought that my problem was boot media failure/corruption. It could still completely be that I suppose, I haven't done a completely fresh config/rebuild on my system in 9.10 and I don't plan to until 10 goes stable. I have not yet attempted any form of firmware/BIOS flashing on the mobo, I suppose I could try that and see.

Anyone run into any similar issues with hardware like this? Just curious if these are precursor warnings of the mobo going or if it's just the flash media showing the quality of it's price point.

 

[Ericloewe]

Try a different USB drive model. Do a fresh install and upload the config file.

Or go with an SSD for boot, it's a quite reasonable option these days.

 

[vilane]

You raise a valid point. small SSDs are pretty cheap now, i could certainly give that a go. I'll have to look at my mobo specs and see if I still have open sata/power rails.

 

[melloa]

Anyone run into any similar issues with hardware like this?

I did have some issues on my FN10 test box with USB sticks (SanDisk) not been recognized on one port and had to move to another to get it going, but with the cost of SSD getting affordable every day, I'd go with what @Ericloewe suggested above - if you have space on your SATA ports.