Mirrored USBs Failing Over and Over

[bigverm23]

first set of usb lasted about 3 weeks, went out and bought 2 new Sandisk Cruzers today, put them in rear ports, and no less than 4 hours later, I have a critical warning of a degraded drive...what can be causing this?

CRITICAL: June 2, 2018, 4:52 p.m. - The boot volume state is DEGRADED: One or more devices are faulted in response to persistent errors. Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue functioning in a degraded state.

any advice?

 

[Ericloewe]

The answer is crap USB drives. Unless you have your system dataset on your boot pool, in which case the solution is to move it to the main pool.

 

[MrToddsFriends]

first set of usb lasted about 3 weeks, went out and bought 2 new Sandisk Cruzers today, put them in rear ports, and no less than 4 hours later, I have a critical warning of a degraded drive...what can be causing this?

If not already done move the system dataset from freenas-boot to a (or "the") data pool.
http://doc.freenas.org/11/system.html#system-dataset

If nothing else helps use (a) better boot medium/media. SSD instead of USB flash drive.

 

[bigverm23]

The answer is crap USB drives. Unless you have your system dataset on your boot pool, in which case the solution is to move it to the main pool.

cant seem to find much documentation on this, why is this causing an issue with new USBs?

 

[Jailer]

Agreed. If you have an available SATA port get an SSD for your boot device.

 

[Jailer]

can't seem to find much documentation on this, why is this causing an issue with new USBs?

Because they are a cheap low quality high volume commodity item. ZFS doesn't play well with devices that are not reliable. An SSD is the answer you seek.

USB is not the boot device you are looking for......

 

[bigverm23]

If not already done move the system dataset from freenas-boot to a (or "the") data pool.
http://doc.freenas.org/11/system.html#system-dataset

If nothing else helps use (a) better boot medium/media. SSD instead of USB flash drive.

Ok I have moved the system dataset to the zfs volume....now just reboot?

 

[bigverm23]

Because they are a cheap low quality high volume commodity item. ZFS doesn't play well with devices that are not reliable. An SSD is the answer you seek.

USB is not the boot device you are looking for......

I thought I was operating on the advice of many to create a mirror boot, ssd for cache/log, and zfs raid for storage volume....whoops

 

[Jailer]

You certainly can use USB for a boot device but as you are experiencing, it's not always the best choice.

 

[MrToddsFriends]

Ok I have moved the system dataset to the zfs volume....now just reboot?

AFAIR yes. BTW: The system dataset of a FreeNAS 11.1 system used as a basic filer (no jails, plugins, VMs) typically causes more than 100 GBytes writes per month / more than 1 TByte writes per year. To be compared with durability of flash drives ...

 

[bigverm23]

AFAIR yes. BTW: The system dataset of a FreeNAS 11.1 system used as a basic filer (no jails, plugins, VMs) typically causes more than 100 GBytes writes per month / more than 1 TByte writes per year. To be compared with durability of flash drives ...

understood, good thing I have a SSD available, and quite a few extra usb flash drives laying around after these "failures"

 

[Chris Moore]

can't seem to find much documentation on this, why is this causing an issue with new USBs?

If you have the log and system dataset on the boot pool, it is constantly being updated. USB sticks are not made for that amount of action. All that write activity will kill them fast.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Chris Moore]

understood, good thing I have a SSD available, and quite a few extra usb flash drives laying around after these "failures"

This is why I use hard drives for the boot pool.


Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[MDD1963]

It would be very nice for the official FreeNAS/IX-Systems folks putting out tutorials on Youtube to mention this, as the last tutorials out within the last year still reflect recommendations to utilize a pair of USB flash drives, reserving your valuable SATA ports for storage, etc...

Finding out that everyone in the forums knows from constant failures is not the desired/proper 'dissemination of info' route...

 

[Stux]

I’m not seeing constant failures.

Out of the 8 or so sandisk cruisers I have in service over the last two years, I’ve only ever had a single checksum error, which ZFS resolved from the mirror.

 

[Redcoat]

@Stux, my experience was quite the reverse - my Dell backup/learning machine sure taught me some hard lessons about 32 GB sandisk cruzer fits' lives when I first commissioned it. Given our respective locations perhaps it's down to the Coriolis effect...

 

[diskdiddler]

If not already done move the system dataset from freenas-boot to a (or "the") data pool.
http://doc.freenas.org/11/system.html#system-dataset

If nothing else helps use (a) better boot medium/media. SSD instead of USB flash drive.

This may explain why I've had so few issues with my system and USB drives. Mine is set to be on the main array, not my USB drives.
Do new installs of FreeNAS default to the USB key or something? (If I recall, I followed a tutorial, which may be why mine is done correctly)

What are the negative implications of having the system dataset on the main array (pool?), if any?

 

[Stux]

I have my system dataset on the data pool.

 

[Chris Moore]

What are the negative implications of having the system dataset on the main array (pool?), if any?

It causes constant activity to the storage pool. Look at this:

My NAS is completely idle. Everyone in the house is sleeping (except me) and I am not using it, but the system dataset is constantly hammering the drives. I use regular hard drives for my boot pool, so I put my system dataset on the boot pool on purpose. The advantage for me is that it allows my storage drives to be idle and saves some wear on those drives. If you have this kind of activity on a USB memory stick, it will kill it in no time at all.

 

[diskdiddler]

Honestly, I'd rather hammer my drives, than my USB keys, after all it's saved me 2 USB ports doing this.

That being said,.....

My next FreeNAS machine, I'm thinking of this

2x USB = Boot
??x HDD = Main Pool (6x8/10TB?)
1 or 2 SSD = Jails

Considering this thread, could I store the System dataset on the new high speed Jails drive?
(I'm hoping to see unrar operations faster and then the system moves the data from the SSD over to the normal pool after)