USB stick boot - rubbish

[JackShine]

Hi

I want to move away from booting from USB sticks, I have 2 sandisks mirrored. They seem to be the only problem I have with my machine, doesn’t matter if I buy new ones, they don’t behave.

Anyway im moving to a single SSD boot drive.
I have 10 X 4TB WD reds, 6 are controlled by the Supermicro MB SATA s the other 4 by an HBA LSI Internal SAS SATA 9211-8i.

My question is, should I connect the SSD drive to the MB SATAs (which means moving all the connections of all my drives), or just connect to the HBA?

Of course ive installed the latest O/S to my SSD and saved my config files.

Thanks

 

[Jailer]

The key factor will be if you can boot from the HBA and I don't have an answer to that as I don't know.

The safe way would be to move one of your current drives to your HBA and attach the SSD to the MB SATA port. FreeNAS doesn't care where they are attached as long as they are accessible.

 

[BigDave]

The safe way would be to move one of your current drives to your HBA and attach the SSD to the MB SATA port. FreeNAS doesn't care where they are attached as long as they are accessible.

I agree with @Jailer on this, you have 8 connections available on the HBA. Another breakout cable
will have to be utilized regardless of what you do here, but booting to a drive on the HBA is a PIA
when compared to moving a hard drive off the MoBo SATA port to free the port up for the SSD.

 

[joeschmuck]

And I agree with @Jailer and @BigDave. Move one of your motherboard SATA drives to the HBA and connect a SSD to the MB. You will need to enter the BIOS and establish to boot device or you will likely get a message stating something to the effect of you are trying to boot a data device.

 

[JackShine]

Yes it will boot, just thinking about the movement of cables, have to move them up.

I know the O/S doesn’t care where the HDDs are, but with 10 drives, tangles and air flow become an issue.

I would prefer not to have the boot drive on the HBA.

And don’t like the idea of moving cables.

I think ill just connect the boot drive to the HBA.

Thanks for your input.

 

[BigDave]

And don’t like the idea of moving cables.

I know how you feel about cables @JackShine ;)
I have made a lot of changes in my hardware in recent months to consolidate cabling in all of my machines.

 

[joeschmuck]

Well I just went with the new wireless SATA plugs. ;)

 

[craigdt]

Well I just went with the new wireless SATA plugs. ;)

Oh whats this wireless SATA plug you speak of ? sounds interesting.....

 

[Evertb1]

, but with 10 drives, tangles and air flow become an issue.
.

I hate tangled cables (and the resulting air flow issues) as well. I was jealous of those people that connected their drives with a brake-out cable (1 x SAS mini to 4 x SATA). That is why I bought some bundled and sleeved sata cables from Nanoxia (2 x 4). Bundling SATA cables your self with some tie wraps also works great.

 

[joeschmuck]

Oh whats this wireless SATA plug you speak of ? sounds interesting.....

Oh, they are awesome. The plugs work on the Flux Capacitor principle through BlueTooth and Manchester Encoding. Yea, a lot of Buzz words but that is what advertising is about. At $30 a pair you just can't go wrong. I have not seen them on sale in the US, but if you really wanted some of these little jems then you could pick them up on Romulus IV and get a free Neutronium Generator with a purchase of six pairs.

 

[Evertb1]

you could pick them up on Romulus IV and get a free Neutronium Generator with a purchase of six pairs.

You should know better. Those Romulans are impossible to deal with.

 

[craigdt]

Oh, they are awesome. The plugs work on the Flux Capacitor principle through BlueTooth and Manchester Encoding. Yea, a lot of Buzz words but that is what advertising is about. At $30 a pair you just can't go wrong. I have not seen them on sale in the US, but if you really wanted some of these little jems then you could pick them up on Romulus IV and get a free Neutronium Generator with a purchase of six pairs.

Hahahaha :D, sadly I know all those buzz words. Sadly I was thinking along the lines of something practical like an USB stick that plugs directly into the SATA port thus no need for an adapter or something to that effect...

 

[joeschmuck]

Hahahaha :D, sadly I know all those buzz words. Sadly I was thinking along the lines of something practical like an USB stick that plugs directly into the SATA port thus no need for an adapter or something to that effect...

I'm sure it's possible to have something like this in reality however it may not be practical.

 

[Ericloewe]

I'm sure it's possible to have something like this in reality however it may not be practical.

What're you talking about?

https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/SATADOM.cfm

 

[joeschmuck]

What're you talking about?

https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/SATADOM.cfm

Not quite the same as connecting a 6TB hard drive without cables but you could have also just gone with a PCIe to M.2 add-on card that holds multiple memory cards and you are still cable free.