On 7 August 2012 00:21, Sašo Kiselkov <skiselkov...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm considering rebuilding my home server (an HP MicroServer) for some > higher capacity and dumping the single 250GB rpool disk and instead > replace it with a pair of USB flash sticks (no need to preserve data, > I'll copy stuff around and help the system along with booting). The > question is, is this a good way to go about it? > Are there any gotchas with using USB attached storage as boot media in > OI? Any experience with that? (For all I know, it's smooth and working.)
I have tried several different USB sticks inside my HP Microserver as the rpool for OI installs. While the system supports doing it the experience was universally poor; ranging from pathologically slow boots right down to periodic checksum errors on some sticks under heavy I/O load to rpool filesystems. I ended up installing a 60GB SSD in the optical drive bay and attaching it to the fifth internal SATA port (the "OD" port), having applied a BIOS hack to turn it into an AHCI port. This worked very well. I would only recommend USB sticks for booting a SmartOS-like distribution where you do hardly any writing to the boot device (ever) and only read around 250MB from it into RAM *once* per boot. -- Joshua M. Clulow UNIX Admin/Developer http://blog.sysmgr.org _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
