Why can't FreeNAS share the the installation disk with user data?

[polomora]

Hello,

Up to now, I've been using a Lacie-D2 NAS for backing up my user data here at home, but is now full. Instead of buying a second NAS, I thought I'd first try out FreeNAS with a 5-year old HP desktop machine I had lying around.

During installation, I noticed that FreeNAS will not allow the installation disk to be shared with user data. Is this true? The PC I was planning to use only has space for a single HDD, and cannot boot from from a USB stick. I would have thought that not being able to share the installation disk with user data is a severe restriction for home users. After all, My Lacie-D2 shares its internal hard disk.

Or have I misunderstood?

Paul

 

[jgreco]

It would have been a severe restriction ten years ago, when booting from USB was unusual. As it stands, to create a more appliance-like experience, isolating the operating system from the data is an excellent idea. It allows you to do painless upgrades and downgrades while retaining your untouched previous install (just put in a new key!) and solves a boatload of issues related to how to size and partition a system resulting from sharing the system and data partitions. It is a much cleaner solution, especially now that an OS will fit on a very cheap USB thumb drive without issue.

An HP desktop, five years old, that won't boot from USB? While anything is possible, I suppose, I'd really suggest you double- and triple-check the BIOS, because I find that hard to believe. This machine I'm typing on is an HP DC7600, which is a 2005 vintage machine, and it most certainly CAN boot from USB, but it really likes for you to have the USB key installed, reset the machine, go into the BIOS, and then select the boot order such that the USB device takes precedence over the HDD's, and then save it, after which it'll boot from USB. Or there's some key sequence to override, too, but that's no good for "server" use of course. I'd wager your machine boots from USB just fine, and you just haven't figured out the details. HP is among the most competent of the PC vendors from a hardware perspective and they usually get that sort of stuff right.

 

[cyberjock]

My old machine from 2003 was bootable from USB!

Even if your machine boots from USB, you may want to look at RAM. If you plan to use ZFS you'll need lots, and a 5 year old machine may be limited to 4GB or less :(

 

[polomora]

Thanks for the replies jgreco and noobsauce80.

I rechecked my PC, and found it under the Hard Disk Group!
I had expected a separate USB Group. Duh...
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Have now successfully installed FreeNAS on the USB drive, looking forward to using it.

The PC has only 1GB of RAM. Would this be enough if I use UFS? I don't need RAID/mirroring. I'm just want it to backup data already stored elsewhere on my network.

 

[jgreco]

It should be fantastic for backups with UFS. In the old days we ran entire departmental fileservers on 32MB of RAM, but of course FreeBSD has gotten bigger, and FreeNAS is written in a bunch of scripted languages and other things and nowadays 256MB is kind of smallish for a server. At 1GB I wouldn't worry. Do be aware that FreeNAS is heavily focused on ZFS, so be sure to test your settings, do a few reboots to make sure everything sticks properly, because there's always a chance that you'll run up against a bug most people aren't seeing, but I would expect it to be just fine and very pleasant to use. Mirroring should be available with UFS if for any reason you would need it, by the way.

 

[polomora]

Many thanks