Suggestion: Mirror FreeNAS OS on all storage devices

[James Snell]

Why not change FreeNAS so that every drive you attach will be added a mirror member of the OS volume? This just makes sense to me, probably because I know little of the bootloader's requirements. Has this concept been discussed? Am I living in a dream-world?

Both my FreeNAS rigs run on mirrored USB flash drives and both have drive failures that seem to hinder updates, but otherwise work fine. It's sort of annoying as I want the same data redundancy for my FreeNAS OS volume as my actual data volumes. Since installation to mirrored volumes is supported, it seems like I'm probably not completely crazy to suggest this.

Back in the ~1920's, before I used FreeNAS, I rigged my file server such that it could boot from any attached drive. It was basic, just each drive had a copy of the bootloader that could let the system keep booting when my retro BIOS would change boot orders due to moving drives around. It was a fine approach. An n-way mirror of the OS volume would be the same concept scaled rather beautifully. Right?

Insults? Compliments? Irrelevant comments?

 

[Ericloewe]

My first thought is that this breaks the separation of OS and data, which is one of the three holy separations (the others being church and state; and executive, legislative and judicial).

As for the non-impulsive response... I see it as needless complexity, a solution in search of a problem, which inevitably attracts new problems. Boot device reliability is fine with even low-end SSDs.

 

[SweetAndLow]

It's way smarter and better to separate you data from your os. This way you can corrupt, lose or change your os and it doesn't affect your data.

Redundency on your os doesn't matter much when you can reinstall and upload your config in 10min.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[James Snell]

Yeah, I guess I'm sold. I like the idea of having the user data so completely separate from the system that a system upgrade could happen with the data completely detached. Well, thanks for brief discussion.