[CentOS] Install to internal USB?

Fri Nov 8 22:40:27 UTC 2013
Jim Wise <jwise at draga.com>

On Nov 8, 2013, at 17:12 , Lists <lists at benjamindsmith.com> wrote:

> On 11/08/2013 02:06 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
>> On 11/8/2013 12:57 PM, Lists wrote:
>>> Saw a trick today, wondering if anybody else had done/tried this? Assume
>>> you have a 1U rackmount with 4 front-accessed drive bays, and you want
>>> all four bays for a 4-disk RAID5 storage.
>>> 
>>> The idea is to use an internal USB adapter and a couple of bigger USB
>>> thumb drives to install to, RAID 1 style, freeing up all your external
>>> drive bays. At first, I didn't think that a thumb drive would hold
>>> enough for the O/S, but in actual production use for a file server with
>>> 14 TB of redundant storage, the OS actually uses less than 6 GB!
>> USB thumb drives are really not that suitable for anything doing random
>> writes, lots of small files, etc.
>> 
> Agreed! In the case of a file store, there isn't a whole lot going on 
> with the O/S drive, just the drives that the O/S is hosting. The 
> original post recommended that /var/log be run off the big partition 
> being hosted (on spinning disks) to minimize writes to the flash drives.


It’s worth noting that FreeNAS does more or less exactly this, using a USB drive with a more-or-less read-only OS image to serve some number of spinning or flash disks.

-- 
				Jim Wise
				jwise at draga.com




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