Hi all,
My system is currently running happily with mirrored 16 GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit 2.0 boot drives. A week or so ago, one of the boot drives failed. No big deal, I had a spare (same size, brand and model) so after determining which one was going south I took it out and plugged the new one in. However, when I tried to replace the failed drive in the FreeNAS GUI, I got the "device too small" error. Also no big deal, I have config backups, so I reinstalled FreeNAS to the two working USB drives, imported the config and was up and running again within an hour or so.
Now I'm thinking that if I will have to re-install FreeNAS if one of my boot drives fails, I would not be a lot worse off using an un-mirrored boot drive. My A1SAi-2750F board only has two working USB ports so this would make one available for my UPS. Currently, my UPS is connected to the serial port, and is about 90% functional, but there are problems with the mge-shut driver and I would like to try usbhid-ups. (As an aside, I would be happy to be proven wrong about the USB ports, but I have tried every combination of BIOS settings in "South Bridge" and I cannot get USB 2 or USB 3 devices connected to the board's USB 3 ports to be recognised in FreeNAS).
My question: is there anything I should be considering about running without a mirrored boot drive? The issue I can see is that my config backups are stored in the FreeNAS zpool, so if the boot drive fails in such a way that I can't boot at all, I won't be able to get to the config backup. My understanding is that this would simply require booting off a fresh install and importing the zpool to access my config backup. Anyway, the configs backups are further backed up to CrashPlan so I could conceivably download them from there with the mobile app and email them to myself!
Be happy to have some feedback if anyone sees any issues.
Thanks very much for reading,
Tom
My system is currently running happily with mirrored 16 GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit 2.0 boot drives. A week or so ago, one of the boot drives failed. No big deal, I had a spare (same size, brand and model) so after determining which one was going south I took it out and plugged the new one in. However, when I tried to replace the failed drive in the FreeNAS GUI, I got the "device too small" error. Also no big deal, I have config backups, so I reinstalled FreeNAS to the two working USB drives, imported the config and was up and running again within an hour or so.
Now I'm thinking that if I will have to re-install FreeNAS if one of my boot drives fails, I would not be a lot worse off using an un-mirrored boot drive. My A1SAi-2750F board only has two working USB ports so this would make one available for my UPS. Currently, my UPS is connected to the serial port, and is about 90% functional, but there are problems with the mge-shut driver and I would like to try usbhid-ups. (As an aside, I would be happy to be proven wrong about the USB ports, but I have tried every combination of BIOS settings in "South Bridge" and I cannot get USB 2 or USB 3 devices connected to the board's USB 3 ports to be recognised in FreeNAS).
My question: is there anything I should be considering about running without a mirrored boot drive? The issue I can see is that my config backups are stored in the FreeNAS zpool, so if the boot drive fails in such a way that I can't boot at all, I won't be able to get to the config backup. My understanding is that this would simply require booting off a fresh install and importing the zpool to access my config backup. Anyway, the configs backups are further backed up to CrashPlan so I could conceivably download them from there with the mobile app and email them to myself!
Be happy to have some feedback if anyone sees any issues.
Thanks very much for reading,
Tom