Advice on boot device options

[pschatz100]

I currently boot my system off of mirrored 16Gb USB sticks. This works OK, but every year or so one of the USB sticks fails and I have to replace it. While this has never jeopardized my system (and I do keep good backups), it is annoying and I have been considering whether or not it would be worth the effort to migrate to an SSD.

Small SSD's below 120Gb are attractively priced. I know that FreeNAS 9.10 would not take advantage of the extra space. Does anyone know if there are enhancements coming in FreeNAS 10 that would allow better use of all the space?

Does anyone have experience using a PCIe adapter with M.2 SSD's? This would allow me to use all my SATA ports for disks (I have an X9 Supermicro with 6 Sata ports.)

 

[JohnDigital]

I have not used any M.2 drives with FreeNAS yet. I would assume they are, or very soon, are going to be supported within the OS, but most likely not in your BIOS to boot from. In the past people have talked about boot SSDs and I swear by THESE. Its basically the only place you can find the small SSDs. Ive had two running in my system, without issue for well over a year now. Also I did run across THIS yesterday as well if you are running low on SATA ports. Seems a decent deal considering its pre flashed and comes with both brackets. Alternatively you can get something like THIS which are much cheaper because they only support up to 2TB drives (think SSDs under 2TB, and your other drives are 2TB), but booting from it might be tricky to set up, so shift your other drives to it and free up the motherboard to use SSDs.