Warning after Bluefin install: '<Pool>' is consuming USB devices 'sdj' which is not recommended

[ericnotthered]

After upgrade to Bluefin, I get a new warning associated with my external USB drive: 'Backups' is consuming USB devices 'sdj' which is not recommended.

'Backups' is a pool that I have created on an external 12TB USB drive. The pool shows no issues that I can see on the Storage or Datasets page.

Can anyone give any guidance on this? Is there some action required? I can't find any reference to this in my searches.

Thanks for reading.

 

[Daisuke]

You should never use an USB external drive for pools. If you attach the USB drive, it will be seen by OS and you can copy the files from an existing pool to USB drive with rsync.

 

[ericnotthered]

Interesting. Why shouldn't you use external USB drives for a pool?

In my case, the drive is used exclusively for replication backups.

 

[Ericloewe]

Why shouldn't you use external USB drives for a pool?

Several reasons:

1. Historically, USB-to-SATA bridge ICs have been very unreliable. This seems somewhat improved with the latest UASP-capable ones, however.
2. External hard drives are typically not cooled well at all and quickly overheat when under load.
3. USB has historically been a rather crummy bus. This is improving, but the mindset is still "cheap, cheap, cheap", broadly speaking. See also point 1. above.
4. When vendors start with "creative ideas", there's a big potential for all sorts of pain and data loss - I'm mostly talking about multi-disk enclosures.
5. External disks are extra-vulnerable to "oops" moments, from tripping hazards to sneaky removal of the disk.

In my case, the drive is used exclusively for replication backups.

Now, the choice of words here is a good one, because this is a recommendation, not a hard rule. A backup disk that is expected to be rotated around is an example of a scenario where I wouldn't criticize the choice of an external USB hard drive. Of course, all the above points still apply, so it's good to keep them in mind and design your system to protect your data from them.

 

[HRS]

I am getting a similar error for a SATA SSD, which is not part of a pool but used as a boot drive.
The system booted for ages from a USB stick (I now know that that is not recommended), and when the USB stick died, I replaced it with an internal SATA SSD
The system works well, except for this warning: "'freenas-boot' is consuming USB devices 'sdg' which is not recommended."
1. the system is running the latest version of TrueNAS scale, the name "freenas-boot" is a remnant from my initial installation. it is of no consequence, but I would like to change it. how can I rename the drive?
2. although the warning lists 'sdg', the drive is currently on 'sda'. The system must have renamed the device nodes
3. what do I have to do to deal with this warning?

 

[Ericloewe]

"freenas-boot" is a remnant from my initial installation. it is of no consequence, but I would like to change it. how can I rename the drive?

Good question, I'm not sure you can without tweaking something. Most people just live with it.

Anyway, that story sounds weird, what's the output of ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/?