USB stick boot - realistic time until failure?

[Ianm_ozzy]

Hi all

I upgraded my CPU/motherboard setup using another machine.

Presently the boot bool is 2 x 16GB USB.
It is not recommended which is the purpose of this post.

The motherboard has 8 sata ports, but will be looking to use them for data drives.

The pcie ports on the motherboard I have other plans for - NVMe drives & network adapters.
Oh and the onboard nic is busted which does not make things easier.

So I will backup my data, add more drives, install truenas and create a larger pool.
I think truenas writes more to the boot drive than freenas.

Should I even care? Those memory sticks are so cheap. I can get another to simply replace and have ready plugged in anyway.
I think the config can be saved anyway and reloaded if required.

Also there are USB to sata adapters available but do not trust them. Are they designed for long term use, or just making a backup?

It is a home machine. Downtime is an inconvenience and not an income threatening event.

 

[Evertb1]

I don't know of any way to predict the time to failure for a USB stick. I do know that I have lost some of them in my time and once I lost two within three months. Since that time I use a single SSD as my boot device and did not look back. Should you bother? That's up to you. As long as you backup up your configuration, loosing your boot device will cost you only some time to reinstall. Reinstalling and loading your configuration is a fairly simple job. And if some downtime is not a big issue for you then you don't have much of a problem. For me failing USB sticks annoyed me enough to get done with them.

 

[Newfoundland.Republic]

I agree. I have read that others mention using USB to SATA adapter when they have run out of onboard SATA ports but want to run a boot SATA drive.