Best flashdrive for FreeNAS

Level1Techs INBOX.deb
1

What USB drives do you guys use for FreeNAS installs? I have had one fail on me already and from what I understand, it's because FreeNAS uses the drive quite a bit. I like now that you can mirror the boot device, but I still want to make sure that the USB stick lasts more than a few months at a time.

The one that I had that failed: ADATA UV100 8GB

Thanks for input.

2

I have had a freenas box running for about 3 months now and it is always on. I have freenas install on a 8GB sandisk cruzer flashdrive. I haven't had issues with it.

Personally I haven't tried any other ones so I couldn't give a suggestion on what's best but the sandisk cruzer that I am using just works.

Hope that helps.

3

Have two FreeNas boxes running one runs on a old 8gb Sony the other on a 8gb sandisk, the sandisk was new never used, the sony is years old and has been written to tons of times before it went into the box....now you have me worried about it! lol

4

i thought the reason freenas has such high ram requirements is because it loads everything into ram and then only writes back to the flash drive when needed. or am i wrong? @wendell might be able to help. personally i just think it was a bad flash drive

5

It may have just been a bad flash drive. When i was doing research when it happened, what i found is that FreeNAS does a LOT of writing to its boot device, with logs and what not.

6

i think thats why some people use SSDs in their FreeNAS builds is for the logging and caching

7

I wouldn't go for flash drives personally.

I see people buy small (30GB?) Intel SSDs which seem like a good option.

8

Probably doesn't really matter which flash drive you use. I prefer to use the little ones that don't stick out very much that way if they're plugged in the back the have a lower chance of getting broken. You could use a SSD but the only real advantage is the speed at which the machine will boot. And yes, Freenas will load into ram and then run from there and then any config changes will be written back to the flash drive. SSD is overkill IMO. Just think about it this way, most VMWare ESX hosts will run on a flash drive or an SD card for a very long time.