Adding new drives to TrueNAS but am running out of SATA ports. Can I connect boot SSD to the USB2.0 port with an adapter without a speed penalty?

[Skaught]

I don't care if it takes longer to boot, but do not want to have transfers or VMs be slowed somehow due to the slow speed of the USB2.0 ports on my Microserver. If I can put 6x 4tb drives on the existing SATA ports and move the SSD to the onboard USB2.0 bootable port I can build a full 6x 4tb raid5 pool.

Do I need to do anything special to put all the swap & virtual memory etc into the pool as opposed to the 60gb SSD that would be on the USB2.0 bus?

 

[sretalla]

Do I need to do anything special to put all the swap & virtual memory etc into the pool as opposed to the 60gb SSD that would be on the USB2.0 bus?

Swap should never be used in a healthy system, so no penalty to have it on a "slower" disk.

Running the SSD as you propose should be fine.

 

[blanchet]

I boot my HP Microserver Gen8 with a SSD plugged on a SATA3-to-USB adapter. It works well for years.

 

[NugentS]

The boot drive / pool doesn't do much after booting - so you can make it as slow as you like and it will only effect boot. Just make sure your system dataset is on a different pool (which it will be by default)

You can use a flash drive, but these are generally not reccomended. Use instead a M.2 to USB (either SATA or NVMe) adapter and boot from that - or as you suggest a USB to SATA interface. Just avoid thumb drives