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My experience, I use usb flash drives as the system drive in my nas, is that sandisk makes the best flash, samsung is next best and kingston is garbage. It has
by somat 3y ago
My experience, I use usb flash drives as the system drive in my nas, is that sandisk makes the best flash, samsung is next best and kingston is garbage.
It has been a few years since one failed(thus the ringing endorsement of sandisk) but I started out with kingston datatravelers and burnt through 3 of them in 6 months, I am still a bit sore about this because the data traveler was the perfect form factor, I then bought a mix of sandisk cruiser fits and samsung bars, in the 5 years following, one of the samsung units has failed and I am still on that first sandisk fit.
The kingston units might be perfectly fine under normal use, but exhibited all sorts of strange problems when used as a system drive.
If curious it is a truenas box with the system installed on a two unit usb flash mirror. The way truenas works it is sort of a waste to install it on anything large, so while less than ideal(buy lots of spares) usb flash fits better.
- tentacleuno 3y agoSpeaking of TrueNAS, in theory ZFS is a lot better for long-term storage. The ARC (RAM caching) and L2 ARC (SSD caching) means that there's a lot less wear on the drives. My TrueNAS Scale box has 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD as a cache. If the SSD fails, it doesn't really matter: the data is always checked against the checksum (as I understand it). If the drive fails, it just uses the backing storage or the ARC.
- raylad 3y agoI thought that USB flash drives were not made to withstand the duty cycle required of system drives, and that's why SSDs cost more - because they have the hardware to transparently detect errors and remap them to a reserve set of locations.
- somat 3y agoThis is mostly true, things like truenas and routers(many ubiquiti edgerouters use usb flash drives as the system drive) get away with it by reducing writes. truenas only writes to the system drive when you make a configuration change. all logging is done on the data drives. Honestly I am not sure why usb flash drives are so terrible. no market for good drives?
- bombcar 3y agoUSB drives are fine, but they’re just made for a different use. You can spend money and get good ones, but super cheap ones exist so it’s safer to say “avoid”.
- thulle 3y agoTruenas recommends SSDs since half a decade ago or so due to the high failure rate. The forums felt pretty flooded with posts about failed USB-drives for a while there, and even before that I switched to installing on a SSD since I got tired of having a triple-mirror USB-setup just to keep the system alive long enough to be able to replace them (system was located across town back then).