Freenas boot USB volume degraded, again!?!?

greeners · December 7, 2019, 11:40am

HI all,

I have a FreeNAS host, which I have had for some years. A fine piece of software. Now on latest stable release 11.2-U7.

Twice in the last 6 months the boot volume has become degraded when one of the USB memory sticks goes bad. Fortunately I notice quickly I have a problem with an email alert. I immediately replace it (time may be of the essence) then the other one fails, and I immediately replace that.

My question is - WHY?? I must be either buying poor quality USB memory devices or there are enough writes to the USB boot volume to wear them out. This last replacement has lasted 3 months. That pretty hopeless.

I have been using Sandisk Cruizer Fit 16GB USB 2.0 flash drives, quite small and from a premium brand - so I thought they would be ok. What does the group recommend for FreeNAS boot drives?

Thanks,

LTS_Tom · December 7, 2019, 12:55pm

In all the years of using the Sandisk ones in our FreeNAS systems, I have only had one go bad, but I have heard people say that this happens quite a bit. Not sure if we are just lucky or what. For the higher end setups we us a SATA DOM instead which works really well and has better endurance.

g-aitc · December 7, 2019, 2:34pm

Have you tried high quality SD Cards? Though Tom’s suggestion below is best.

aspectux_brian · December 20, 2019, 10:44pm

@LTS_Tom I am hoping you might be able to assist and help me with a similar issue except both of my USB disks seem to have failed at the same time. I do have a recent backup copy of the Config and secret I think Not completely sure how things work on FreeNAS when you upgrade, etc. any help and assistance would be really appreciated. Thanks Brian

LTS_Tom · December 20, 2019, 10:54pm

Reload FreeNAS on good USB, restore backup, re-import volume and use the key that you backed up.

aspectux_brian · December 23, 2019, 3:37pm

Tom,

I tried reloading a new drive for the FreeNAS OS, I tried doing a restore and using the secret but I think I might be in no luck because I don’t believe I had saved the encryption key, I did’t know about it until I was watching a video of yours this morning. I am a bit of a newbie so is there a way to restore or should I consider everything to be lost due to the two failed usb’s that had the FreeNAS installed. If I don’t have the encryption key and if the new usb’s won’t boot. I am really hoping that my data is not lost.

Thanks,
Brian

aspectux_brian · December 23, 2019, 4:31pm

Tom,

I found a backup of the Encryption key and was able to restore the Volume.

Thank you for the help.

Brian

bobstertime · December 24, 2019, 1:19pm

I agree with Tom anything other than SanDisk or Samsung has failed on me as wekk. I just do a boot mirror now for piece of mind.

greeners · August 2, 2020, 10:18am

I noted a nice piece of work by spaceinvaderone on YourTube: Testng to find the best USB flash drive to boot an OS like Unraid. He has made his space on YouTube on Unraid software, and although I think it inferior to FreeNAS (soon to be replaced by TrueNAS core, currently in beta) the testing is useful. Sandisk did not fair well, so maybe when my next Sandisk USB boot drive goes bad I will replace it with a Samsung noted by spaceinvaderone in his testing.

I am surprised how easy and quickly a USB flashdrive can be driven to destruction by the test software. I used that test software to fix my used (bad) sandisk drives BTW, reading all blocks gives the controler a chance to level out the bad cells, but I think I will not re-use them for a boot drive or valuable data anyway.

Here’s the link https://youtu.be/jjkaidlZmgs