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mirroring OS drive

Posted: 04 Feb 2015 14:17
by pumo
I just bought and waiting for HP microserver Gen8 for Nas4free.
and read about that in freenas there might be possible to mirror os drive also, so is it possible and/or recommended in Nas4free ?
there is inner microSD and inner USB connector what could be great to use for it (if possible)..

Re: mirroring OS drive

Posted: 04 Feb 2015 14:29
by raulfg3
pumo wrote:and read about that in freenas there might be possible to mirror os drive also, so is it possible and/or recommended in Nas4free ?
not, possible ( at least in a easy way) & not recomended.

Recommended install is in a USB key and embeded . ( an option in the install menu, that copy an image to your USB key and only read it to load in RAM during start boot process), so your USB key is not "burning " with a lot of writes.

Re: mirroring OS drive

Posted: 04 Feb 2015 20:01
by armandh
the ease of replacing the OS "medium" and reloading the OS and saved config, makes a mirror of little benefit. [IMHO]
I prefer PATA or SATA industrial flash depending on the MOBO situation.
http://www.logicsupply.com/components/s ... h-modules/
http://www.logicsupply.com/components/s ... h-modules/
I have never had one of these fail.
their rugged industrial quality over consumer USB flash is IMHO preferred to complex mirroring of the boot medium,
an extreme remote location might be an exception.
if one is short of IDE connection points I have successfully tested the PATA flash with an old USB drive case
in any event, always use the embedded OS unless there is a "must" reason for not doing so.
the RAM's higher buss speed makes operating from RAM one less thing to impede the throughput.

Re: mirroring OS drive

Posted: 04 Feb 2015 22:08
by pumo
Ok thanks. I thinked installing to usb old way :-)
And I wasnt even sure how it uses USB...

Re: mirroring OS drive

Posted: 04 May 2015 19:04
by madpenguin
What I have done to install the OS to a gmirror partition is to follow FreeBSD practices of creating gmirror boot, root & swap partitions ( I used regular SATA drives)
After creating the gmirrors I copied the OS from a previously installed USB drive. I needed to do this because I have a very custom (modified) OS. I have tweaked samba to work with specifics of our AD, so a regular NAS4Free installer wont recover or save me from disaster.

I done this a year ago so i need to retrace my steps, but I'll be posting the detailed steps I took.

Re: mirroring OS drive

Posted: 04 May 2015 19:23
by raulfg3
your post are wellcome, but as you say only for very specific need ( it's not recomended to use a modiffied version of n4f, but some special or power user can do, because have enought knowledge to do).