What's new

Booting a NAS from a Flash drive

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

B

briandorling

Guest
Hi,
currently I am running one "production" Linksys NSLU2 with Debian, and have a second one that I use for testing. Maximum throughput via SMB is about 2-3MB/s. So throughput is low, but power usage is also low as the disk spins down by itself when not in use. Currently it runs as a file server, logging server, Firely MP3 uPNP streamer and does regular automatic backups via Dirvish of all PCs that are switched on around 8pm each evening. It works fine, but I need some new disks, best ones seem to be SATA now, and the Slug does not support SATA (Although I could maybe get an external USB enclosure that does take SATA disks, not looked into that yet). Anyway, a replacement should be low-power, but not in the direction of a blindingly fast NAS (as described in various articles here). So I am also looking at ATOM tests.

What I would like to do is boot the NAS from an SSD. Transcend has them with IDE interface for example. A simple Debian install does not take up too much space, so 4-8GB would do.

My idea would be to have all user data on a green WD 5400 rpm drive. For backup I would rsync that drive to another drive occasionally. Here, power usage etc is too important so I do not want the second drive to be constantly powered on. But for various reasons I favour a disconnected (no cables at all) drive for keeping my data fairly safe.

So, I know about trying to keep the write cycles down on flash drives, and how to do that under Linux. I also cannot see an speed andvantages of using a flash drive. What about power-usage and reliability compared to having a real HD for boot? Of course the idea is to almost never need to boot the NAS, so I do not want a whole hard disk just for a boot partition.

Anyone got any experience of using a flash as boot drive. Opinions?

This is the kind of thing I was thinking about using:

http://www.transcend.de/Products/ModDetail.asp?ModNo=26

Cheers Brian
 
I don't think there is cause for concern. Flash life has increased dramatically from when they first appeared. It is write cycles that cause the wear anyway, not read.
 
Hi Tim,

well like I said I think flash, especially with wear-leveling and virtually no writing to it by the Linux OS, should last a long time. I am just wondering if there is any real-life experience of using it out there yet?
BTW to keep write cycles down my ideas is to put /dev and /var into a ramfs at bootup. The rest of the Linux FS will mainly be used RO I guess.

I guess I'm still open as far as the mainboard and CPU to take. Low power will be the key though. Low power, but still enough to be able to feed the disk-performance onto the Gbit ethernet without the CPU being the bottleneck.

Bit surprised about many of the test results here showing very little performance gain from using raid. For me the sweet-spot seems to be a 5400rpm drive of high-density, should have fairly low power consumption and still perform OK. Whether I get around 40MB/s or 60MB/s will be of little importance to me I hope, after the Slug everything is high-performance I guess.

Cheers Brian
 

Similar threads

Support SNBForums w/ Amazon

If you'd like to support SNBForums, just use this link and buy anything on Amazon. Thanks!

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top