USB? Or which SSD?

[oguruma]

I am planning on migrating to a Freenas box soon. I was originally planning on using a USB drive as a boot device. I have read some documentation that says that these are a bad idea and that I should use a small SSD, and some that indicate that they are just fine.

So, what's the consensus? Should I use a usb drive? If so, which one? Or should I use an SSD? If so, which one?

 

[religiouslyconfused]

Some people use 2 USB drives that are mirrored, and it is not hard to do. Just press space on both thumb drives and it will work just fine. You can always back up your configuration file if your USB drive fails. In fact, you should always back up your config file in case of anything wrong is going to happen.

 

[jgreco]

The big deal with USB is that the thumb drives are manufactured to be just about as cheap as they can possibly be, and they tend to break under the strain of 24/7 access by FreeNAS, even though that access isn't horribly stressful.

 

[Ericloewe]

To be fair, with careful selection, USB flash drives are fairly reliable. Slow as hell when it comes to random workloads? Heck yes.

 

[jgreco]

Hadn't seen any amount of "careful selection" to yield something that I could comfortably deploy to gear that's 800 miles and 14 driving hours away.

 

[Ericloewe]

Hadn't seen any amount of "careful selection" to yield something that I could comfortably deploy to gear that's 800 miles and 14 driving hours away.

Of course, reliability requirements vary from case to case. If I had to drive 14 hours to fix a problem, I'd just throw in two Intel SSDs and be done with it.

If I have to get up, climb a flight of stairs, take out the server, open it and replace the boot device, the added expense isn't quite as justified.

For what it's worth, I'm moving to a single SSD on the new server not just because FreeNAS won't boot from USB on Skylake hardware, but mostly because updates are excruciatingly sllllloooooooooowwwwwwww. Same goes for manipulating boot environments.

 

[ponas]

For what it's worth, I'm moving to a single SSD on the new server not just because FreeNAS won't boot from USB on Skylake hardware, but mostly because updates are excruciatingly sllllloooooooooowwwwwwww.

What happens if your SSD goes belly up ? (assuming you have a backup of the config files somewhere safe) From what I understood having 2 mirrored USB offers redundency in case one fails but even though SSDs don't fail as often as USB I guess they still do eventually. So is it possible to just buy a replacement SSD, plug in the config file and be up and running again ? or is there a risk to have nasty things happen to your server if you don't also have 2 SSDs ?

 

[Bidule0hm]

The USB drives die because they don't like writes at all, and while a SSD don't like that too much either it'll see a very light load in comparison to a classic usage (for the OS in a desktop for example) so it'll last a very long time (I guess more than the server itself...).

Yes, just reinstall and upload the config file ;)

In theory yes, but it's a very very very low probability.

 

[Jailer]

What happens if your SSD goes belly up ? (assuming you have a backup of the config files somewhere safe) From what I understood having 2 mirrored USB offers redundency in case one fails but even though SSDs don't fail as often as USB I guess they still do eventually. So is it possible to just buy a replacement SSD, plug in the config file and be up and running again ? or is there a risk to have nasty things happen to your server if you don't also have 2 SSDs ?

So use a single SSD and keep a spare USB drive handy for use as a backup while you order a new SSD.

 

[oguruma]

So I think I will get started with 2x USB drives. Any recommendations on which ones to use?

 

[Mirfster]

Seen the "Sandisk Cruzer Micro" ones mentioned a few times. Since if it is attached externally, the chances as lower that you may bump into it and break it.

Examples: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00812F7O8/?tag=ozlp-20

Also seen it mentioned to get two different brands to help avoid any short comings in a particular brand. I use SSDs or older 2.5" drives myself and have them mirrored. So I guess to each their own. Just keep a backups of the config either way and you should be good.