External USB HD Corruption

[ShadeDream]

Due to a recent hardware shuffle I'm playing around with setting one up as a small media server on our home LAN using FreeNAS. Yes it's not the ideal many here would look for (cheap consumer mobo, Athlon II x2 CPU etc) but it's what I have available to test with at the moment.

I've gotten the OS installed on a flash drive and have been working my way through configurations, but I'm running into an issue where after I configure an external USB HDD (ZFS) it eventually manages to somehow corrupt the USB drive, lock up and then on reboot will not get past bios with the drive plugged in. I can unplug it, boot, reformat it and it works again. I haven't run any tests specifically on the drive (any you'd recommend?) but it's a drive I've had a while and hasn't ever had any other issues so I'm not expecting it to be a problem with the drive at this point, but not ruling it out. The drive is a 1TB external WD drive (2.5").

I've not been doing much with it yet and I'm not sure if it's connected but it seems to do it when or not long after I configure plugins in freeNAS (plex and some others).

 

[gpsguy]

Please provide detailed information about your hardware and version of FreeNAS. ZFS on FreeNAS needs a minimum of 8Gb RAM. How much do you have?

Also USB connected disks can be problematic. Can you mount one internally? Perhaps test one with an internal connection while you familiarize yourself with the OS.


Sent from my phone

 

[ShadeDream]

I'm running 9.1.1 and unfortunately only 4GB of RAM at the moment (DDR2 is pricey). The only reason I'm using ZFS is because the plugins refused to install without it. I'm not running a raid or anything like that. It has been fine with the (small) internal drive. I'm more or less suspecting the fact that it's USB to be the issue. Like I said, I'm really just evaluating FreeNAS with the hardware at the moment and if it fits my needs I'll probably use it short term and be building a proper system sometime down the road when the funds are available.

Specs:

Athlon II x2 255
Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H (785G, DDR2 and yes, crap Realtek LAN)
4GB RAM
4GB Sandisk Cruiser
150GB internal HDD
1TB WD USB drive

 

[cyberjock]

When it comes to running tests on USB drives, you pretty much can't. SMART doesn't work and a failing disk generally causes the USB chips to go haywire or disconnect the drive. For these reasons we never recommend USB for much of any reason(even not recommended as a backup) as its hard to determine that your backup drive is even healthy. It would suck to use an external USB drive for your backups and then when you have a need for it you can't even retrieve your data.