When I originally got pfSesne I used an old laptop hard drive. I was thinking of running it off a thumb drive. I am pretty sure I remember you can run it off one or dual thumb drives. I want to do this because I want to eliminate having to run the sata power for this.
Is there a pro/con of running it off a thumb drive? The only con I can think of is if I have large log files. This is being used at home and not a business customer, so I really don’t mind.
Also, is there any specific install instructions for installing it on a thumb drive? I want to make sure the thumb drive is persistent so my changes are saved.
The con is that large amounts of r/rw kills thumb drives quickly. While things like FreeNAS live mainly in RAM pfsense does a fair amount of work on the disk. While it might be a little bit of a pain to figure out the sata power, I think it’ll be less headache in the long run.
I have never tried installing it on a flash drive, but SATA would be better. For the logging issue you can go to Status -> System -> Logs Settings and turn off writing logs to disk.
I did the flash drive thing for a while on my personal network. I killed one flash drive in just a few months and kept my logs in ram, ended up starting over with a 2nd flash drive till I replaced that with a hdd. The whole time I used the flash drives it made making any changes in the webUI painfully slow. You’ll get more reliability and speed out of a sata hard drive tbh.