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.