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I believe FreeNAS does something like this during startup. You can “install” it on mirrored USB drives in case you run out of power. The redundant USBs are used
by wil421 7y ago
I believe FreeNAS does something like this during startup. You can “install” it on mirrored USB drives in case you run out of power. The redundant USBs are used to install the OS back into RAM. An extra USB in case of corruption and they’re way cheaper than SSDs. I’m assuming you still need to write config files back to the USB.
FreeNAS prefers ZFS so it’s RAM hungry anyway. The article recommend 500mb more than you need.
Can you do this to an Arch VM?
- imtringued 7y agoSSDs cost 26€ for 128GB and offer significantly more performance and reliability. USB drives are not significantly cheaper.
- wil421 7y agoWhy do I need 128GB when 8GB will do fine? I have so many USB drives I wouldn’t even have to buy one. Microcenter gave me a free 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive last time I went. Amazon has $4.99 16GB USB 2.0 flash drives from SanDisk. I’m sure you could find cheaper chinese brands. The FreeNAS community recommends 5+ year old server hardware running refurbished or used enterprise SAS drives. Performance is not an issue when you never want to shut it down.
- wayoutthere 7y agoUSB thumbdrives are far more portable than NVMe or PCIe SSDs though. Performance doesn’t matter too much in this type of setup; once the OS is loaded into RAM it shouldn’t hit the thumb drive again.
- jlgaddis 7y agoSSDs would also require additional SATA (in my case) ports and a place to install the SSDs. I used all of those for the devices that are actually storing my data. Because this is a "real" (headless) 2U server, none of the USB ports were being used so, while dedicated SSDs for the boot volume would be nice, a pair of decent 16 GB USB flash drives have been doing a wonderful job serving as my mirrored "freenas-boot" pool.