On Nov 8, 2013, at 17:12 , Lists lists@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.