SOLVED migrate to smaller USB boot drive?

[digity]

I have FreeNAS booting off a 16 GB USB flash drive (it's all I had at the time of installation), but I want to migrate to a smaller 4 GB USB flash drive - I'm assuming the boot stuff doesn't actually take up much space so 16 GB is overkill for this. Plus I'm running low on 16 GB drives (for other projects) and have plenty of 4 GB drives on hand. How do I migrate the boot drive to a smaller one?

 

[garm]

Read the manual.. http://doc.freenas.org/11/intro.html#the-operating-system-device

 

[Ericloewe]

4 GB is not an appropriate size. 8 GB should really be the absolute minimum. To quote the manual:

The absolute bare minimum size is 8 GB. That does not provide much room. The recommended minimum is 16 GB.

 

[Stux]

To migrate, backup your config. Then reinstall, then restore.

But seriously, why bother? 16GB USBs are like $7.

 

[diskdiddler]

Stick with 16s.
I wanted to downgrade to 8s, because they're dirt cheap and I found a deal for 5 of them for $10 - but it's simply too small.

16 is a nice figure, bit of room to move for updates and future groth of the OS.

 

[digity]

wow! I would have never guessed it needed more than 4 GB. good to know, thanks everyone!

 

[diskdiddler]

When updates are installed there's (kind of) like a snapshot made, so the updates stack on top. I think.

This allows you the ability to roll back. It's worth the space, 16gb keys are nothing, what's more important is you have identical size / brand keys and preferably a spare in the drawer.

 

[Chris Moore]

I use a mirrored pair of 40 GB 2.5 inch hard disk drives. I picked them up on eBay as inventory closeout which were still new in factory packaging and they were only about $8 each. It gives me enough space that I don't have to consider deleting the snapshots of the previous boot environment. At this point, I have about three years of previous boot images I could roll back to if I needed to. I can also get full SMART data from the drives to keep an eye on the health, like all the other drives in the unit.
It is not possible to monitor the health of your USB drive, so you never know when they will suddenly die. I had two USB drives die on me in a single year, which is the reason I went to a more reliable solution.

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[digity]

I use a mirrored pair of 40 GB 2.5 inch hard disk drives. I picked them up on eBay as inventory closeout which were still new in factory packaging and they were only about $8 each. It gives me enough space that I don't have to consider deleting the snapshots of the previous boot environment. At this point, I have about three years of previous boot images I could roll back to if I needed to. I can also get full SMART data from the drives to keep an eye on the health, like all the other drives in the unit.
It is not possible to monitor the health of your USB drive, so you never know when they will suddenly die. I had two USB drives die on me in a single year, which is the reason I went to a more reliable solution.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

Yup, this what brought my attention to the USB boot drive in the first place - its failing (and has been for over 8 months). I just mirrored it yesterday, but still need to find another 16 GB USB drive to replace the original failing 16 GB USB drive. Though I like your idea of using small SSD/SATA drives mirrored for the monitoring benefit.

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[Chris Moore]

Though I like your idea of using small SSD/SATA drives mirrored for the monitoring benefit.

I switched from USB drives to SATA spinning disks about three years ago and have had zero problems from the drives. They are older model SATA-2 drives but they are plenty good for the little bit of use they get from FreeNAS and I anticipate they will last six to eight years, easily.