Advice on mirrored USB vs single SSD for boot

[joeschmuck]

I went down this path of having my boot drives setup as a RAID mirror. As previously noted, a typical motherboard RAID is purely a software driven event, this only works for a system which has a software driver that support it such a Windoze. This is not a true RAID. So I recieved a true RAID card and installed it into my machine and attached the two SATA SSD's to it and now I had true fail-over RAID support. If one of the drives fail, the RAID card will ensure the second drive picks up the load. The only reason I even went down this path is because I'm running an ESXi Server. If this were just a FreeNAS server for home use then I'd recommend using a single SSD as the boot device and ensure you retain a current copy of your configuration file so you can easily perform a recovery.

 

[wblock]

As previously noted, a typical motherboard RAID is purely a software driven event, this only works for a system which has a software driver that support it such a Windoze.

True. Although FreeBSD and FreeNAS support most motherboard RAID through the graid(8) system. It's kind of neat in that it supports motherboard RAID volumes even on motherboards other than the one they were created on. See Software RAID Devices. Of course, those arrays can't boot unless they are on the original motherboard or a compatible one.

Having said all that, I still recommend avoiding motherboard RAID.

 

[joeschmuck]

See Software RAID Devices.

Thanks for the read!