SOLVED FreeNAS 11.2 Will Not Boot.

[Janky Jay]

USB sticks are not recommended any more, you are reading outdated recommendations. You should not use a USB stick for FreeNAS, they are far too unreliable. See if you have an empty M.2 slot or two on your motherboard, SATA DOM, or do some expansion with a PCie slot or something. There are plenty of creative ways to get additional slots available.

Hrm. I've always read the recommendations from freenas.org and USB sticks still seem to be mentioned as perfectly viable solutions for the OS device for 11.2 [1]. Is there different documentation elsewhere that I should be following?

[1] https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/11.2/intro.html#the-operating-system-device

 

[SynbiosVyse]

The link that you posted shows that the OS is run from the boot device, not a ramdisk, so you want the OS to be on a high performance and reliable media such as an SSD.

This comment corroborates this discussion and shows the change has been made back in version 9.3:
https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/moving-from-usb-sticks-to-ssd.72451/#post-503903

Also a good blog entry here:
https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/sata-doms-over-usb-drive/

"Unfortunately for us at iXsystems, most FreeNAS users use consumer-grade thumb drives as their boot medium. And of all the horrible storage media out there, thumb drives are only better than SD and MMC cards."

"Thumb drives are the modern version of floppy drives. And like floppy drives, they are short-lived, slow, and prone to failure without telling you."

 

[fracai]

Unfortunately for those at iXsystems, the documentation explicitly suggests USB sticks as a viable boot option. Yes, it goes on to recommend "quality, name-brand USB sticks", but it gives no indication as to what that means. There's certainly no suggestion that USB sticks aren't recommended in general.

Personally, I've had nothing but problems when using USB sticks. Even two sticks in a mirror just meant extra hassle when one went bad. I have an SSD now and it's been great. I'd guess the only reason USB sticks are still in the documentation is laziness or convenience. I don't know though, ECC RAM is called out as "highly recommended" and there are still plenty of people who run without it. I can't see how removing or further demoting USB sticks would cause any headache.

 

[Janky Jay]

Thank you guys! I've never had any issues with USB sticks (I do use high quality ones, though) but I've always wanted to migrate to an SSD mirrored setup. I just don't have the bay capacity to do so. In the past, I figured if I had room for SSD's I'd use them for ZIL or L2ARC as opposed to the OS itself (mainly due to the OS being so small). Of course, ZIL and L2ARC aren't really needed on these particular setups so I'll just try and find a place for SSD's somewhere. Thanks again!

 

[fracai]

Turns out there is this regarding demoting USB booting: https://jira.ixsystems.com/browse/NAS-101056