Hi folks. I’ve done a forum search around this but found nothing conclusive.
So, does anyone have experience of running Rockstor from a USB stick/thumbdrive?
Particularly interested in whether there were notable speed issues or failures sooner than might be expected when compared to running from a ‘proper’ SSD or HDD?
I’m currently running v4 from SATA attached SSD, which means all 4 SATA ports are used (1 system, 3 data). Am considering adding another data drive and thus moving the system drive over to USB. I could simply move the current SSD to USB via an adapter, but a USB stick is also on my mind.
@GeoffA, highly theoretical, as I’m not running Rockstor from a USB stick. However, even if the read/write from the system drive is fairly low, I would expect that you first would only do it with a 3.x capable USB port/stick combo.
Additionally, I would look for an SLC based USB stick, which is what you find in SSDs. Most of the USB thumbdrives out there are using MLC which has a much lower life-expectancy (I think around 1/5 of that of an SSD).
I thought this post was insightful on the performance side, but it obviously didn’t deal with the reliability:
I haven’t figured out how to get the “host writes” on my system drive to give you an idea what my system SSD has been doing over the last 5 years, so if I do, I’ll post it. That might help with determining longevity requirements.
@Hooverdan thanks for this. Yes, what you’ve summarised there are most of the things that have gone through my mind. Thanks also for that link, I’d not come across that one before.
My inclination is to go with SSD connected via USB3 internally using the motherboard header, as I already have the system on the SSD.
I use a SanDisk Extreme usb 3.0 - there built as little ssd’s with a usb-to-sata bridge. I’ve had no problems with it. I presume their successors are similarly built.
Yes, I’ve used these myself also. But as you indicate they are no longer available, which is a shame as with the addition of the ‘-d sat’ custom smart option:
Disk Custom S.M.A.R.T Options http://rockstor.com/docs/smart/smart.html#disk-custom-s-m-a-r-t-options
they could also offer a modicum of smart info. This I have yet to see work on one of the successors I tried from a little while ago:
SandDisk Extreme Go USB 3.1
which is faster in some ways but not by much, and slower in others. Sorry no current test data on that and I’ve only tried it in older USB 3.0 ports as well. Worked as a Rockstor system drive though.
Incidentally, I’ve also had a long service Extreme USB 3.0 start showing smart warnings as well. Wear limit I think it was, don’t have it any longer unfortunately. But it had done a few years service.
I have this running on USB but will admit it’s not very fast. I’m using an old 16GB USB 2.0 drive internally in an old HP Microserver G7 server/NAS unit w/ 16GB memory. This HP unit is probably 10 years old and this was my experiment to not have to dispose of it. It has a slow AMD Turion proc and slow USB 2.0 ports. I do I have 4 x 2.5 inch SSD drives. It appears for this device you cannot have all drives loaded during RockStore setup as it will only display 4 drives. Each time I tried the install w/ all bays loaded it would not recognize the target USB drive and took some tinkering to figure it out. After that I was able to do the install, which was slow. Boot is slow and website performance is somewhat slow compared to running off the SSD drive, however it does run. I’m able to run all 4 drives in a pool where as the internal drive installation (not using USB for the OS) would take up one and leave me only three drives to use. So far so good though, as I rather have a bit of slowness than lose a whole drive from array from the RockStor install.
@Crawdad Welcome to the Rockstor community forum, and thanks for the feedback here.
Re:
The larger memory for this unit is a help here.
From a quick look, does this model also have a SATA CDROM drive. Could that not be replaced with a regular small sata ssd for use as the system drive? As booting from cdrom was a thing, the bios may also be ‘game’ to boot the replacement device. I’ve not looked into this however, but I though I remembered some talk of this procedure; to do as you are doing and make full use of the 4 regular drive bays. That would then help a lot with the OS performance as we have had time-outs reported when the OS was running on a USB 2.0 device.
Also what version of Rockstor are you using with this HP Microserver G7. And based on what base-OS.
Philip, thanks for the super quick response. Mine did not come with the CDROM but does have a power connector for one and the documentation I found says there is a spare SATA for ODD on the MB. I haven’t confirmed that yet, need get a look at the MB to confirm it. However, this is a really good suggestion on your part as I just happen to have an old 250gb spinning SATA drive lying around I could use and this would probably make a much better setup than an old raggedy USB. Nice link to the other thread as well. Now i’m curious about that BIOS update to allow the additional drive.
Philip, many thanks, again. I ordered a SATA cable and power adapter and drive tray for a 2.5"/3.5" internal drive. Loaded in an older 250gb 3.5" 7200 RPM SATA drive and went to go boot up for install and…nothing…just a big red light on the unit. Turns out I knocked off a old-school CMOS jumper that was preventing boot up. Was fortunate to find one I had from years ago and after installing it, boom, it’s alive. Installing Leap 15.4 w/ 4.5.8-0. Ran the zypper updates, which is noticeably slower than when I had it on NAS SSD the other day but I figure speed of the OS disk won’t affect the performance all that much. Ran RockStor version update from the webUI to get it up to 5.0.8-0 which seemed to go w/out much issue. WebUI didn’t want to launch until after logged into the console. Overall everything seems to going pretty well. Have a single pool for testing and all 4 SSD show up.
