Boot USB drive failing, process to replace?

[pschatz100]

Any way I can tell which USB drive was the offending one? After the reboot, the warning went away...

Not easily if the errors are intermittent. Earlier this year, when I updated to 11.1, I decided to do a clean install and replace the mirrored USB drives with a small SSD. Updates go faster, and I have not had any issues at all.

Glad I made the change.

 

[Stux]

Any way I can tell which USB drive was the offending one? After the reboot, the warning went away...

If your usb drives have activity leds you can dd from one of them to /dev/null and determine which is which.

 

[devnullius]

Not easily if the errors are intermittent. Earlier this year, when I updated to 11.1, I decided to do a clean install and replace the mirrored USB drives with a small SSD. Updates go faster, and I have not had any issues at all.

Glad I made the change.

I've been thinking to do that too (but I don't think the FN community isn't a fan of bookable SSD disks...?). And one would have to find a way to dd the boot partition regularly to a second partition, as a backup of sorts?

 

[wblock]

I've been thinking to do that too (but I don't think the FN community isn't a fan of bookable SSD disks...?).

Not sure what you are saying. If there is space and an extra SATA port, replacing a USB stick with a small SSD for the operating system is an easy way to make the system more reliable.

 

[gpsguy]

That was true in the old days, prior to FreeNAS 9.3. With earlier versions of FreeNAS the boot drive was a fixed size (~3GB). Running from a flash drive was recommended and they typically ran for years. With 9.3 and later, we’ve see a lot more flash drive failures. There are a number of reasons, but at the end of the day, small SSD are now cheap, fast, and very reliable.

I've been thinking to do that too (but I don't think the FN community isn't a fan of bookable SSD disks...?)

 

[pschatz100]

I've been thinking to do that too (but I don't think the FN community isn't a fan of bookable SSD disks...?). And one would have to find a way to dd the boot partition regularly to a second partition, as a backup of sorts?

There is no need to be so complicated. SSD's are very reliable and it is not necessary to have mirrored SSD boot drives. Just be certain to keep a copy of your configuration file - which FreeNAS makes easy to do.

In the worst case, if you have a total drive failure you can always do a fresh install and then restore your configuration. It is no big deal.

 

[Ericloewe]

It's not like mirrored boot devices are complicated, either.