2.5 HDD as boot drive

[2fanatyk2]

Hi,

I have a couple of old laptop drives lying around and was thinking of using them as boot drives (currently running on dual mirrored sandisk sticks).

I have never seen usage of 2.5HDD mentioned on the forum, everybody's talking about using SSD's instead. Both solutions are way more robust, than USB sticks.

I appreciate the fact, that SSD's are cheap nowadays, but old laptop drives are often "free" if they are just lying around + recycling/re-use is also a thing

Any cons to that, besides power usage?

Quick power usage calculation: laptop drives are usually rated at 3.75-5W, so average usage should be around 3W. That gives ~26.3 kWh per year, approx 5 USD per year per drive. SSD's would mostly be idle, and their power usage on idle would be negligible. If you can get SSD for 25 USD, it will save you enough electricity to cover the cost in ~5 years.

 

[danb35]

I have never seen usage of 2.5HDD mentioned on the forum

Paging @Chris Moore...

I don't think it's done very often, but there's no real reason it can't work. Setting up a mirror would probably be a good idea.

 

[ornias]

I've seen plenty of mentions of 2.5" HDD's for pools, not often for bootdrives though.

I don't think the decrease in IOPS would be an issue, although there are some reports of early versions of TrueNAS Core 12, having issues with low sequential writes... Which might be an issue with older 2.5"H DD's

 

[winnielinnie]

I've seen plenty of mentions of 2.5" HDD's for pools, not often for bootdrives though.

I don't think the decrease in IOPS would be an issue, although there are some reports of early versions of TrueNAS Core 12, having issues with low sequential writes... Which might be an issue with older 2.5"H DD's

Write performance shouldn't be an issue for the boot-pool, no? I would assume most of the activity from the boot devices would be to load as much as possible into RAM (during system power on), and some minor occasional reads or writes, such as when changing settings. This is assuming that the .system dataset (and syslog) lives on one of your storage pools.

 

[rvassar]

It used to work fine under FreeNAS, and I don't see any reason why it won't work for TrueNAS. If you can source them for free/cheap and have the SATA ports, it's certainly better than chewing thru $10 USB thumb drives every few weeks.

FWIW - I pulled an old 500gb HGST laptop drive out of a lightly used but EOL laptop, put it in a USB enclosure and ran it 24x7 for almost 46k hours attached to a RPi 3 house widget. I finally retired it out of fear of failure, rather than any actual problem.

 

[joeschmuck]

I have never seen usage of 2.5HDD mentioned on the forum, everybody's talking about using SSD's instead.

They work fine, no concern functionally. The only thing I can think of which might be a good thing, most laptop HDD's spin up and down very frequently, they operate this way and were designed to operate in this environment. So does this mean the drive will live a longer or shorter life? I have no clue but they can be cheap to have and a small drive should last a long time. Look at the Apple Ipod that had a HDD, that sucker lasted my daughter until the battery would no longer hold a charge (over 7 years) and you know the drive spun up/down very frequently.

Regardless of the path you go, always maintain a current copy of your configuration file and you will be able to easily restore your system should you have a boot drive failure. And I would not use a mirror but that is just my opinion, many people love boot mirrors.

 

[Jurgen Segaert]

I've been using a single old 2.5" laptop drive as my boot device for years. My reasoning was the same: I had a few of them lying around and wanted to re-purpose them. Updates are an order of magnitude faster over using a USB thumb drive.

I run SMART tests, system dataset is on my main/data pool, and have a few replacements available as "cold spares".

As per @danb35 here's another mention of using 2.5" laptop boot drives

 

[2fanatyk2]

Write performance shouldn't be an issue for the boot-pool, no? I would assume most of the activity from the boot devices would be to load as much as possible into RAM (during system power on), and some minor occasional reads or writes, such as when changing settings. This is assuming that the .system dataset (and syslog) lives on one of your storage pools.

Hey, just wondering - wouldn't it be more efficient to move syslog and .system dataset to boot drives in that case? I've tried it in my early days of Freenassing (and killed a couple of Sandisk USB's in ~2-4months in the process, but always had them mirrored so no data loss), but with proper SSD/HDD I believe writes required for those will not harm them much.

Does performance of .system dataset and syslog drives impact performance of Freenas in any noticeable way? Any risks I'm not seeing (again: I'll be running mirrored drives).

The reasoning behind this is that it saves some IOPS on main pool, decreases it's wear&tear and possibly saves electricity in the process. Even though I don't intend to use spindown, I believe it takes a lot more power to read 8 large disks, than 2 small laptop HDD's.

 

[Constantin]

Any cons to that, besides power usage?

I use two $18 2.5" 120GB SSD drives in my latest pool for booting. While mirrored boot pools are not the answer to every potential boot issue (thank you, @joeschmuck!), they do offer the potential for a quick recovery from many boot pool issues. Laptop SSDs or HDDs should work just fine.

I read an article here recently suggesting that swap gets created by default as part of the installer on boot disks if the boot disk is over 60GB (see the whole thread). Thus, a >64GB HDD laptop drive combined with insufficient RAM may make for a sluggish TrueNAS/FreeNAS experience if swap is installed on the laptop HDD. So besides maxing out RAM as much as your use case dictates (and your wallet tolerates), I'd stick to SSDs for the boot pool as much as possible.

Regardless of what you use for your boot pool, do scrub it occasionally, run SMART checks on it, etc. just like your main pool, and back up you config!

[EDITED to reflect the article I found, yay!]

 

[danb35]

I read an article here recently suggesting that swap gets migrated to the boot disks if the boot disk is over 64GB.

I remember that thread, but I don't recall if the installer automatically creates that swap partition, or if it just offers to. In any event, you wouldn't ordinarily expect swap to be used very often.

 

[winnielinnie]

Hey, just wondering - wouldn't it be more efficient to move syslog and .system dataset to boot drives in that case?

The only problem is that TrueNAS does not allow you to set encryption on the boot drive, let alone any datasets that might reside on it. It may be possible to do this via the Shell, but the behavior might be unpredictable in the future. How TrueNAS Core 12 handles the .system dataset is to check to see if the target pool's root dataset is encrypted, and if so, it simply inherits the encryption properties. This is never the case with the boot device, since no such encrypted root dataset exists.

Some people prefer to have .system and syslogs encrypted, so their only option is for it to live on a data pool; not the boot device.

Does performance of .system dataset and syslog drives impact performance of Freenas in any noticeable way? Any risks I'm not seeing (again: I'll be running mirrored drives).

None that I have ever noticed. My workload is nothing compared to an office or "many simultaneous users" environment, so I would have to defer to others on their experience with performance impacts of .system dataset and syslogs on their data pool. My hunch tells me it's negligible.

 

[2fanatyk2]

I use two $18 2.5" 120GB SSD drives in my latest pool for booting. While mirrored boot pools are not the answer to every potential boot issue (thank you, @joeschmuck!), they do offer the potential for a quick recovery from many boot pool issues. Laptop SSDs or HDDs should work just fine.

I don't entirely agree with @joeschmuck 's point. It is extremely easy to setup BIOS so that if one boot device fails, it boots from next one - in fact that's exactly how I had it setup from start, and every single boot device failure impacted me no more than by displaying notification in freenas, and me having to replace USB drive and resilver it.

I also believe, that as long as at least one drive works (so .system dataset and syslog writes have somewhere to go), as long as you don't reboot the system it shouldn't crash freenas, since boot order is not relevant while it is already running, doesn't it?

Even if it wasn't set up this way, once freenas doesn't want to boot up anymore - just switch boot device in BIOS and it's working again - easy enough.

Still, it might be more problematic if you forget to set up BIOS right and have remote server - what is not my case personally. Anything I'm missing?

 

[2fanatyk2]

The only problem is that TrueNAS does not allow you to set encryption on the boot drive, let alone any datasets that might reside on it.

Is there any data in .system dataset or syslogs, that is actually sensitive and should be encrypted in typical home usage scenario?

Email login (for email notifications), possibly freenas/users password, but I guess unless somebody actually physically "steals" the drive it should be safe anyway. Am I missing anything?

Of course in case of commercial/multi-user usage it is crucial to encrypt this data.

Best regards,
Adam

 

[Constantin]

Anything I'm missing?

As I mentioned in my subsequent reply to @joeschmuck, the failure mode matters. If a drive fails catastrophically, then your ordered boot sequence solution covers the issue. However, how does the pool deal with one drive being just slightly corrupted? A mismatch between just two drives doesn't trigger a fact-finding mission by the CPU (i.e. which one do I choose to boot from), right? This sort of failure mode is the reason so much in commercial aerospace is triple+ redundant.

That said, even if it comes to a subtle corruption issue on one pool drive tanking the boot sequence, I still think it's easier being able to restart a server when a fully-current boot disk is already in it (even if you have to shut down the server, pull the bad drive, and install a new one).

 

[winnielinnie]

It is extremely easy to setup BIOS so that if one boot device fails, it boots from next one - in fact that's exactly how I had it setup from start, and every single boot device failure impacted me no more than by displaying notification in freenas

This is exactly how I have mine set up as well: my BIOS is configured to boot from both drives in order of priority:

• #1 choice: SSD1
• #2 choice: SSD2

If SSD1 ever fails, or is removed, or is replaced? No problem. BIOS will see that is it missing and boot from SSD2. I can then redo the mirror for my boot-pool once I am in the system again with a fresh SSD ready to be installed.

If SSD2 ever fails, or is removed, or is replaced? No problem. I'll get an alert, and go through the above steps.

I also believe, that as long as at least one drive works (so .system dataset and syslog writes have somewhere to go), as long as you don't reboot the system it shouldn't crash freenas, since boot order is not relevant while it is already running, doesn't it?

This is what I recently went through myself. I placed .system dataset and syslogs on my (mirrored) boot-pool prior to upgrading to TrueNAS 12. During this process, I actually removed one of my boot drives, replaced it with a "larger, faster" SSD. Then I repeated this again for the other old remaining boot drive, and replaced it with a second "larger, faster" SSD. I was able to grow the size of my boot-pool (using the Shell, as I could not find a GUI method), and rebooted again for good measure. Not a single interruption, not a crash, not a freeze, nothing. All this meanwhile I had .system and syslogs on my boot-pool.

 

[Newfoundland.Republic]

I use two $18 2.5" 120GB SSD drives in my latest pool for booting

Me as well. Under $20 for a couple of SSDs seems better than $20 for a good USB drive...

Happy New Year, all!

 

[Constantin]

I remember that thread, but I don't recall if the installer automatically creates that swap partition, or if it just offers to. In any event, you wouldn't ordinarily expect swap to be used very often.

I found the article and the testing that went into determining just when IXsystems changed the installer to allow swap drive creation on boot disks. Happiness. Now I can get myself another coffee and sweep up more hair from the floor.

Me as well. Under $20 for a couple of SSDs seems better than $20 for a good USB drive...

Absolutely and happy new year to you too!

As an aside, in late Nov. I bought two used Intel SSDs for a new boot pool. They were put into USPS first class mail system on Nov. 30 in South Bend, IN and have not been "seen"/tracked since. By mid December I gave up and bought two 120GB on Amazon for $18 each and installed them two days later. I suppose the missing drives will show up some day next summer.

 

[joeschmuck]

I don't entirely agree with @joeschmuck 's point. It is extremely easy to setup BIOS so that if one boot device fails, it boots from next one - in fact that's exactly how I had it setup from start,

Well you may think that but if the primary boot device becomes corrupt to where the BIOS recognizes the device and boot hangs, it will not magically move to the second boot device. The first boot device needs to not be recognized by the BIOS or be recognized as not a bootable partition in order for the second device to become the boot device. That is the way these things work.

That said, even if it comes to a subtle corruption issue on one pool drive tanking the boot sequence, I still think it's easier being able to restart a server when a fully-current boot disk is already in it (even if you have to shut down the server, pull the bad drive, and install a new one).

And we have had this discussion before and I agree that it may be easier to simply move a drive around to make the system functional again, but I also feel that rebuilding a boot drive is very easy too.

Me as well. Under $20 for a couple of SSDs seems better than $20 for a good USB drive...

Fantastic find! SSD's are so much cheaper these days.