best installation media?

[zinneken]

The installation instructions mention to install freenas on a (cheap) usb, compact flash or similar media, and not to install on a separate internal HD.

For running the system, cheap USB and flash storage are not great in terms of speed compared to an older/spare HD. I'm wondering if installing freenas on a normal USB stick would be faster or slower then installing on a dedicated HD.

In fact, what would be a cheap installation media that allows for the fastest performance of freenas?
old IDE HD (like an ATA33 or 66)
generic USB2 flash drive in a USB2 port
generic compactflash card in a generic USB3 reader
generic SD card in a generic USB3 reader

 

[pirateghost]

The only speed increase you would notice is when making changes in the web GUI. How often will you be making changes? Personally I prefer to leave it alone after it is configured.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus

 

[zinneken]

Thanks for the info!
I'm wondering then what impact the hardware has on the speed of freenas (other then having a plethora of RAM, SATA2 or 3, and fast drives)?

 

[Whattteva]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe FreeNAS mostly runs off RAM once it's fully booted, so I doubt you'll see any difference in performance if any at all other than what the previous poster mentioned (changing settings on the GUI), which shouldn't happen often at all.

As for hardware, I believe you want to shoot for 2 GB/TB of space. As far as file transfers go, normal platter hard drives are more than fast enough (unless you've got a switch that supports more than 1.0 Gbps).

 

[russnas]

you will only notice a faster boot and saving changes to GUI,

im booting off usb stick but i will get all my sticks and test which is the fastest


read this thread
http://forums.freenas.org/threads/install-freenas-on-sd-card-or-pen-drive.11435/

 

[cyberjock]

By faster boot, you are really talking about saving a few seconds. USB speed really doesn't have a big factor in boot times or system performance while the system is running. I have a thread somewhere that I compared a slow USB2 stick to a Kingston that I have that is extremely fast USB3. The difference was like 10 seconds.