Free nas ideas

[Brycetimothydavis]

Was wondering if anyone has any expirence with using a sd card with a freenas box for the jail and all system info and and system plugins??

 

[Alabalcho]

For what I know, FreeNAS is quite resource-hungry when storage approaches terabytes, so booting off SD is kind of useless.

I can't get you you meen as "jail etc"

 

[ex_bubblehead]

For what I know, FreeNAS is quite resource-hungry when storage approaches terabytes, so booting off SD is kind of useless.

I can't get you you meen as "jail etc"

A FreeNAS installation is slightly less than 2GB in most cases and the installation guide actually instructs that you install to a USB thumbdrive. If you use a hard drive you will lose all of the drive beyond what is needed for the OS as you cannot use the system drive for storage. To answer the original question, yes, you can use an SD card for the jail and plugins.

 

[Alabalcho]

@Ex_bubblehead,

Yes you can, no one argues against that. The question is - how long will this SD card last for? Or that USB stick? And what will happen if after planned restart it just don't start?

I do agree that it might take 2gb only, and I am not promoting putting 4tb as a system drive. But "small" SSD, even repurposed laptop drive will be ages ahead in reliability.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

The media is essentially read only as once booted everything is in memory and only configuration gets written. The SD or USB stick will last a LONG time (mine dates back to the beginning of FreeNAS time). If you're paranoid about losing your bootable stick then it's trivial to clone it periodically.

 

[Ijack]

The question is - how long will this SD card last for? Or that USB stick? And what will happen if after planned restart it just don't start?

The computer already uses non-volatile RAM to boot from, in the BIOS. You might worry more about that wearing out than the easily replaced SD card.

This is just not a concern. You can rely on the developers to know what they are talking about when they recomend booting off a memory card.