ZFS NAS configuration question

[Dan Naumov]

USB root partition for booting off UFS is something I have considered. I
have looked around and it seems that all the "install FreeBSD onto USB
stick" guides seem to involve a lot of manual work from a fixit environment,
does sysinstall not recognise USB drives as a valid disk device to
parition/label/install FreeBSD on? If I do go with an USB boot/root, what
things I should absolutely keep on it and which are "safe" to move to a ZFS
pool? The idea is that in case my ZFS configuration goes bonkers for some
reason, I still have a fully workable singleuser configuration to boot from
for recovery.

I haven't really used USB flash for many years, but I remember when they
first started appearing on the shelves, they got well known for their
horrible reliability (stick would die within a year of use, etc). Have they
improved to the point of being good enough to host a root partition on,
without having to setup some crazy GEOM mirror setup using 2 of them?

- Dan Naumov



2009/6/2 Gerrit Kühn <gerrit at pmp.uni-hannover.de>

> On Sat, 30 May 2009 21:41:36 +0300 Dan Naumov <dan.naumov at gmail.com> wrote
> about ZFS NAS configuration question:
>
> DN> So, this leaves me with 1 SATA port used for a FreeBSD disk and 4 SATA
> DN> ports available for tinketing with ZFS.
>
> Do you have a USB port available to boot from? A conventional USB stick (I
> use 4 GB or 8GB these days, but smaller ones would certainly also do) is
> enough to hold the base system on UFS, and you can give the whole of your
> disks to ZFS without having to bother with booting from them.
>
>
> cu
>  Gerrit
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