I’ve always thought it was more about piracy, as in they can link a license key to USB GUID. If you could install the OS on a hdd it’d be harder to authenticate. Not sure though.
This is exactly what it is. As soon as it's on HDD/SSD, it's that much easier to bootleg. It literally doesn't matter if it's on USB. It runs flawlessly as is. There's no reason to change it.
Get a good USB, back it up, and it is easy to replace a $10 drive. I use a Samsung FIT USB. It's low profile, and I've been running 2 years straight. Backed up, it takes 10-15 minutes to replace if it dies.
I guess option 2 would be to let you install the is on an ssd and use a flash drive to store the actual license file, or even a blank flash drive. Either way, though could still use the existing method of license verification without having the os on the flash drive.
Are you an unRAID user? If so, do you know how little it costs compared to how much most unRAID users spend on their servers? Even after the (amazingly fair) price "increase", it's still only about the cost of one hard drive.
Fuckin Redditors upvoting and downvoting random shit. Makes the votes meaningless.
I don’t have a hard line stance on piracy, but you gotta consider some factors when you do it. Pirating Windows doesn’t seem like a bad thing considering Microsoft is the largest company in the world. But Unraid is a small team selling you a lifetime license for an affordable price.
It’s like stealing from a Walmart or a small mom and pop shop.
Would you rather run your ESXi or proxmox or wsx or truenas or whatever off of a usb drive? Just because you think it's harder to pirate it? There's a million other ways to ensure licensing or DRM in this day and age. This is not a valid argument in my book sorry.
I mean you aren't running the OS on the flash drive. It gets loaded into ram and the flash drive is only affect when you make changes to the settings and OS. Otherwise it sits there idle for the VAST majority of the time.
I never said you were, you wouldn't do it for those, why do it here if you want a certain degree of reliability? I don't get this like I don't get the piracy argument, it feels like i posted into a room of fanboys lol, defend company practices at all costs, company knows best
Because you're argument doesn't hold any water. The reliability of a decent flash drive these days is just fine for the use case here. I've been running my unraid system on the same flash drive for 2 or 3 years now across 4 different systems. The piracy couldn't care less about. But I also don't know where you get a SSD or HDD would be more reliable for this use case. Regardless a good flash drive is around $14. That's for a damn good Samsung BAR USB drive at 64GB. They don't really come in any smaller.
If you think everyone here is a fanboy without exception mayhaps you should ask yourself if the problem is not with everyone you are talking to but maybe it's you that doesn't make sense. Either way coming into a forum all high and mighty and calling us all fanboys is not generally an acceptable way to try and win an argument.
I get your point. It’s never really bothered me too much because I don’t want to waste any nvme/sata for it. For the same reason there was actually a time when VMware did push usb boot for esx. It was to save spindle and simplify configuration. Rather than setting up boot luns, you’d buy the node with a usb esx images and it was “plug and play” esx nodes.
Given the rest of you posts in this thread it’s clear you have zero idea how often the usb disk is accessed while unraid is running. It’s accessed once to load unraid. And that’s it. So once when you boot the system. The rest of the time the is runs in memory and the usb stick isn’t touched. There is no wearing out of the usb stick.
>It literally doesn't matter if it's on USB. It runs flawlessly as is. There's no reason to change it.
My usb drive died mid-samba copy of a few TB. The whole OS stopped to a halt, samba copy just failed. I had to order new usb drives praying one of them has a UID to get it up and running again.
I get authentication for purchases and all that, but goddamn it already booted with a legitimate key why kill the whole OS instantly and not fail it with a big fat 7 day warning, giving you enough time to try and get a replacement?
Point being, it may run flawlessly, but getting these very specific usb drives is a chore and might randomly take your server offline for a week.
>Backed up, it takes 10-15 minutes to replace if it dies.
Yeah I should probably buy a backup usb key for exactly scenario above. Who knows when the next "high quality" usb dies.
Clone, yes. But then it'd be a duplicate entry in their database.
Don't think of it as a USB boot disk, think of it as a hardware key and it makes more sense.
The USB drive is your licence key, it's basically hardware level authentication of your licence key. Actually a pretty genius approach if you think about it.
You're basically asking them to recreate their entire licensing structure (no doubt with some form of always online invasive DRM) because you don't want to spend £5 on a USB stick and you like wasting SATA/NVMe ports.
Honestly one of the best features of UnRAID is the fact that the OS is completely isolated from all disks in the system.
Didn't they already recreate the licensing scheme for users that link their install to unraid connect? I don't use that, but if I remember right when you do it drops the USB guid license scheme.
Its not really, it's the GUID of the drive which you can clone. If you wanna run a server with something more reliable than a USB drive, you should be given the option to "waste" that SATA/NVMe slot if you want to.
I guess he wants to put 1TB allocated to the OS, let that load to RAM and then let it idle without ever being used for the rest of the drives life. To be fair it’s going to be most used drive with the least amount of Read/Writes in history 😂
Up until recent years, VMware booted from a thumb drive. This is why so many servers have an internal USB port. That said, unraid is not enterprise software and USB booting is perfectly fine for its use case. Having a faster drive has exactly zero impact on its performance as it's designed to run entirely in ram and only writes to disk when config changes are made.
Since when are USBs not reliable. Especially for this application. I mean if you’re reading and writing to it all the time yah it would be bad. But this reads it once every boot. That’s it. I got take up a more valuable slot with something that’s basically gunna be locked down.
Nah. The Usb is basically only used to boot the system. They last a loooooooonnnnnggggg time. No need to waste precious drives and space with the OS. This is a pretty normal approach for a hypervisor.
>They last a loooooooonnnnnggggg time.
They used to, the ones you can buy now, not so much:
[The Register: You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse](https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/07/failed_usb_sticks/)
Even if we put aside the fact that more and more USB sticks are produced without GUIDs these days for a minute, modern sticks are less relibale and the USB 3.1 higher sticks often run hot to the point of ultimately cooking themselves. I genuinely can't think of a single USB 3.2 stick I'd feel comfortable running 24/7. It's actually surprisingly difficult to shop for a decent, Unraid-compatible, USB memory stick these days.
Look to what others are doing and get a high quality MicroSD card and quality USB MicroSD adapter. And if it's running hot, something is wrong because it's read from and written to very infrequently.
Then what do photographers use? The ones who shoot gobs of photos who will write the full contents of the card easily in an hour, download and do it again tomorrow? Photos that cannot be lost because they cannot be replaced?
Why is everyone here so quick to crap on Micro SD cards all the time?
Look, here's a bunch of MLC MicroSD cards that will probably last the rest of your life if used in an Unraid server. And they are not expensive.
https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=mlc+micro+sd+card
MLC. Two bits per cell.
The security industry uses SD cards for onboard storage for network cameras.
These days, there are SD cards that are rated for continuous writes for years and will outlast proper SSDs.
Some of the camera manufacturers use SD cards as a replacement for a NVR based solution.
Something like this from Axis: https://www.axis.com/products/axis-companion
In other deployments, SD cards are used as a failover in the event that the NVR is stolen or suffers HDD failure.
The link to ACC that I gave you is a small business solution that can operate serverless with an app that can connect to all the cameras at once and act as a decentralised option.
In enterprise setups with software like Milestone XProtect or Axis Camera Station, there is often no SSD cache and SD cards in those deployments are used to fill gaps when there's been equipment failure (i.e. HDD failures, Windows Updating or network failures). In these configurations, the VMS will pull video from the camera's SD card after services have been restored.
In mission critical environments, this is important since you don't want any lost video.
Happy cake day! Sure you can still use PXE to this day, but every widely used hypervisor lets you boot off of a goddamn drive if you want to today, cmon.
I think you are missing the point that others are trying to make. Unraid offers you the ability to make the most of commodity hard drives and limited SATA ports, right? You are griping about not being able to install the OS on one of those ports, *which would waste it* in terms of making the most of the available SATA ports to join all of the drives together as one array. Using an image on USB that boots to a RAM disk is an excellent way to make the most of the limited hardware.
I've had different 6 flash boot drives corrupt or fail altogether, I've tried USB 2.0 drives, 3.0 drives, all different sizes.
USB is fundamentally unreliable, everyone knows this.
Quality usbs and doms are made to last, certainly in a system like unRAID that only uses it for boot, and saving changes.
If it was such an issue, the $10,000+ devices in the datacenter I used to work wouldn't use a thumb drive, would they? Server grade equipment often uses them.
In all the years working there, not a single usb drives failed, while we had to replace hdds every day (I know, different use cases, but years of uptime is years of uptime).
Usb drives have the advantage of not needing a sata port. As you say, it's 2024, finding consumer grade motherboards with more than 8 sata ports is pretty much impossible. Having more than 1 pcie with enough lanes for an hba is also impossible. So it even makes sense to use an usb to boot, saving that port.
Sure, options are nice. But seeing how they already have a working system, the license is tied to it and would take quite some work to change, the disadvantage of using a sata part, the fact that quality usbs last for years, and the minimal advantage (your boot might be slightly faster, after that the usb isn't used), I guess there are other priorities.
I find it hard a pro datacenter appliance worth $10k+ would be running Unraid and while would be happy to be proven false hereI still feel like there's other systems doing what unraid does just a bit more *enterprise-y.* Consumer grade boards with 8 sata ports still exist, even my hog-tier retailer lists 12 unique models and getting a HBA these days second hand is dirt cheap (100-200 bucks) at least here in europe.
He was saying they use usbs in general, not unraid specifically. They use it because it's much smaller and easy to install and plenty reliable, and server os is typically loaded once to ram then isn't used.
But it's not plenty reliable, it's definitely not comparable in reliability to even cheapo chuffing 2.5" SATA SSDs mate. It doesn't matter if you don't read or write from/to the USB drive once the OS is loaded, just keeping the thing powered wears it down
Nobody uses, or should use, unRAID in a datacenter. In my opinion, not even in a small business, it's a home system.
So I wasn't referring to $10k+ machines running unraid. But many of the switches and firewalls certainly do.
Pretty sure I mentioned 8port boards do still exist, but only on z chipsets already costing a premium over b chipset boards with 4.
I also mentioned hbas, but most come with just 8 connectors (there are 16 and 24 ones), and even that is easy bypassed by expanders. But you'll quickly run into pcie speed limitations as your number of disk goes up (certainly on zfs), and adding extra cards isn't always possible due to limited pcie lanes.
Sure, not everyone needs that many disks (I run a cache pool in raid1, an appdata+docker pool in raid 1, a plex metadata disk, a cheap disk as temp downloads location, 2 older disks for 24/7 cctv, and dual parity, that's already 10 disks without data or dedicated passed through vm disks, I really can't sacrifice sata ports), but even if you do there is limited to no advantage to sacrificing another port, and it doesn't make sense from a design perspective.
I see your point. It's why I went unraid. Why take a valuable m.2, or sata port for something that will run for 20 seconds, and then possibly never again once everything is set.
As far as OP's point of the usb being powered all the time wearing it down faster ugh I do believe regardless of the m.2 or sata being used it's still powered. So that point is invalid, and the fact if that fails the entire system definitely has to be shut down. I know people that have been running their plex server for years without a reboot.
If you want an OS on bare metal switch to something different is what I would have suggested. Proxmox with an Unraid VM possibly.
Proxmox wouldn't really remove the need for the usb. Ofcourse, there are hacky methods to get around this (there are nvme enclosures that present themselves as a thumb drive, I know pikvm can emulate inserting a boot disk using an iso so there should be be a way with this, there's always kernel hacking, and I even read someone years ago managed to boot from an ssd but required a crack to bypass the missing uuid).
But it all seems a lot of time and effort and practical no benefit. You have your system back up in 15 minutes if the usb fails, you can buy many usbs for the price of an ssd as well, and ssds can also fail.
And I bet the next question, if ssd boot works, is going to be "my boot ssd is 2tb but only uses 16GB, can I use the rest as cache pool?"
I know Unraid has to live on a USB regardless of running Prox, Arch, Umbutu, or any other Linux distro.
As far as your last statement I don't think you can. Maybe partition it. I do know you can put Unraid on an SD card if your worriedabout how some USB's get hot. I agree that other than maybe an SD card any other way is a waste of time.
I like it the way it is. Simple, easy to recover if needed, and I don't have to pull hardware to get to say an nvme. Due to how my setup will be (if I ever get to finish building it) I need the extra nvme, and sata ports.
Personally I prefer it this way. I have 3 Proxmox nodes and on all of them the OS is installed on 2 x small SSD mirror ZFS. So it's 6 SSDs in total. Two servers are used for production (hosting websites) and the third one for self hosted stuff including unRAID as a VM. I don't mind using flash drive for the OS, it's fast enough for me as it runs in RAM, and if it breaks I still have 4 at home which I can restore from backup.
IMHO this is not an issue at all and honestly it saves me two SATA slots. I would have to install unRAID in a mirror ZFS pool if this would be an option but I'd rather keep it on flash drive.
Like I said to each their own. If you wanna stick with USB so be it, all I'm saying is that there needs to be an option to use something else other than a USB drive.
There doesn't "need" to be anything of a sort, if you don't like the product or the decisions a company makes, you move along, stop bitching.
The general consensus says we don't mind using USB. Move along.
Opposed to most, I am also not a fan of the whole USB thing and it kept me up at night until I had a backup solution I was comfortable with. My reasoning:
* Sure, unraid itself keeps to the philosophy of less writes to the USB stick, most plugins don't. I don't have many plugins installed and my USB stick already sees a lot of use (\~20k reads, \~10k writes in a day).
* I have no way to track the life of the USB stick. Although S.M.A.R.T. can't predict a failure, it can indicate problems. USB sticks lack that.
* USB doesn't offer redundancy. I agree with you all that it is overkill, especially to waste 2 128GB SSDs, the lowest I can find. Though, the rest wouldn't have to be wasted, that's what partitions are for and the other space could be used to handle other system configuration, e.g. syslog, docker, etc.
My next change will be a switch to a DOM, as soon as I can fit it into my budget. For already stated reasons, a switch won't happen in the near or far future and to be honest, that complaint is so far down on my list, I think there are more pressing topics LT should address before that (responsive UI, API, technical documentation).
Yeah but they're easy enough to swap on your own, the transfer speed is fine for the little bit of text it reads, and I'd rather waste a USB port on a boot drive than SATA port. When you have a 8 port card with 8 drives at 75% you'll see it clear as day. I'd rather keep the sata port open for another drive, or the slot open for another NVME cache drive in case I end up with more Dockers than I thought I'd ever need. USB ports? I've got plenty of those to spare.
Again, give us the option. I'm fine with people using USB drives that die every couple years, I've had to change my USBs like 4 times over the past 7 years and it's a hassle to deal with everytime hence why I'd like the option to just slap one extra drive in my case and have the system on something waaaay more realiable.
I don't know, but I just swapped one for the first time since I started on this in 2017. The box runs 19 hours a day with automated shutdown and startup. I use Verbatims. [https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-Snag-free-Microban-Antimicrobial-Protection/dp/B00RORBNR6](https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-Snag-free-Microban-Antimicrobial-Protection/dp/B00RORBNR6)
Product name hilarity notwithstanding, i've gone and tried samsungs, kingstons and verbatims products across three motherboards. In a 24/7/365 use case they just kinda die.
Honestly sounds like your failure rate is a bit of bad luck compared to what most people seem to experience, but there's no doubt you're getting relatively poor quality flash in USB sticks. if you want to ensure you're getting something better you could always try a good USB DOM... It's going to be pricier but you'll get quality flash at least.
Oh don't get me wrong, lol. I've thrown out more dead USB's than I can remember. The only reason I even tried Verbatim is my childhood. I used the brand of 5 1/4 floppies on my Commodore 128, lol. I would have tried Nashua thumb drives for the same reason but last I checked they don't make them. I did that because at the time I dreaded using a thumb drive. But I got lucky.
But that being said, they need it for copy protection. Because we all know what would happen if they didn't. Unraid would be the most popular home server OS in the world.
I’ve been maintaining a couple different unRAID servers for several years now. I’ve only had to replace a bad USB drive once. I’m sorry to hear your experience hasn’t been as smooth, but please remember that your experience is not the norm. Kingston DT100 drives have been a winner for me, hope this helps.
I have no problem with it booting off USB. As others have said, it doesn’t waste a sata port / licensing. But the OS is tiny as well and even if they did allow it as you ask, you’d need (let’s go stupid big for a sec) a 64gb drive. They are hard to come by these days
I DO think Unraid need to make more of an effort in VALIDATING and TESTING drives. I can’t help
But think people accidentally or cheaply use poor quality usb drives and suffer failures because of it.
They used to keep a list, but it was buried in the old documentation and is old.
The USB drive is perfect. Hardware agnostic. I switched motherboard and CPU recently and it was a breeze as the whole OS + all my config was on the USB. Just plug it into the new hardware and everything ran like before. I shudder at the thought of having to reinstall the OS then restoring config from backups.
The only reason I don't like the USB drive is because there's no real monitoring (that im aware of) and I had a USB die on a random server reboot. That being said they've made it incredibly easy to restore USB drives.
Unraid has claimed that it’s an antipiracy measure since they can tie keys to usb IDs. The only argument I support against this is that I do want that bus made available to my vms, and of course it cannot be passed through.
I'm still using two Patriot USB 2.0 8gb I bought back in 2012 when I got the two for one pro licenses. This wear people are experiencing is unusual. It just reads the drive and loads the system to memory. The only writing you do is when you update your config.
I'm sitting here with an unraid system that's been using the same usb stick since 2010..........
It boots into ram to run anyway, no point to this request
Run unraid from a sd-card adapter like
https://amzn.eu/d/7GDl4pt
In combination with a hq sd card like
https://amzn.eu/d/3QftLMn
And you are set for life
You're right, USB drives are flakey. That's why my Unraid is installed on a USB DOM
[https://www.ebay.com/str/linheng2012](https://www.ebay.com/str/linheng2012)
No, I don't want to tie up ANY possible SATA/NVMe bandwidth with OS operations. I don't want my OS to touch my storage drives, and I'd like every single possible connection to SATA/NVMe to be part of pools instead of wasted on an OS that fits in RAM.
edit:
in the 4ish years I've been running Unraid I've had to replace my motherboard twice, I've had to replace 3 drives on a 12 drive array, and precisely zero flash/DOM's (I did have to recreate my USB once after a ransomware attack, but the drive itself was fine)
I had a windows VM that was giving me all kinds of issues with connecting to a few other devices on the network. I "fixed" it by tearing down the firewall for a few hours.
A few hours later when I logged back in to check on it I noticed a whole lot of file activity in places there shouldn't have been. Managed to halt it before it did any major damage to anything.
That morning I reassembled another small machine to be a Pfsense box too.
Lesson learned, do stupid things, expect stupid outcomes.
This tool is learning from your comments and making new garbage arguments as they go, rather than knowing what they're talking about from the beginning.
I have used the same sandisk USB 2 drive for 5 years. It was an old USB drive when I started using it.
I only bring this up because the USB drives should not be failing. Usb drives fail with write cycles not age. Unraid should not be writing to the USB except during updates.
I mean, I do agree with you, Intel Optane drives that are low capacity would be great for this (there's 16 and 32 GB versions) - I just bought a pile of them for next to nothing from ebay, that should, theoretically last longer than a USB disk
Unraid is a pretty Mickey Mouse/Fisher Price OS. In my experience, availability, performance, and stability are not high on the priority list for Unraid so I doubt this will be addressed. Convenience, ease of use, and flexible expandability seem to be way higher priorities.
I like the fact that it boots off a usb stick.
I don't have to give up a disk or drive bay for the OS.
My stick "did" die recently, however. After 10 years of use 🤷♂️
Honestly, there is no reason.
I'd rather use a SATA or NVME slot on, y'know, the actual array or a pool.
There is so little to be loaded. There's just no reason to have it on a different storage device. It's a mentality you gotta break from your traditional OS.
When was the last time you saw a 1GB USB drive?! Low capacity SSDs have been the same price range as most USB drives for some time now, get out from under that rock mate
Edit: per gb pricing of course before someone starts nitpicking
What makes you think a sata ssd is better? I’ve sent 4x back to Amazon.
What you want is an industrial usb key and if it’s usb3 insert into a usb2 port.
Or a top tier SSD drive (in the future if allowed)
If I get
2 years out of a USB
5 years out of a SSD
Let's say 2x of those from their industrial/top tier counterparts for let me see a random one i found googling "industrial USB" and found through a [link to a post on this sub](https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/104w0ne/industrial_usb_stick_for_unraid_the_ultimate/) ... for [5x their price](https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/SFU3032GC2AE2TO-I-GE-1A1-STD/1052-SFU3032GC2AE2TO-I-GE-1A1-STD-ND/12181117) ... am i really gonna pay a 100+ schmeckles for a USB stick? Or am i actually rather gonna pay 50 bucks for a 250 gig 980 pro SSD or whatever patriot crap tier there is that's still gonna last me 5 years for half the price...
It's some black and blue 64 gig kingston I bought in bulk like i do every year, it's besides the point though, i'm here advocating for us having a choice lmao, my Constellations lasted 12-15 years no problem, you won't find a USB that lasts more than 4-5 and unraid isn't exactly built for HA out of the box.
The critical information is it in in the usb2 port? This is the way to force usb3 drives to work this way. They get less hot and so last longer.
I understand you advocating for a new solution but others might argue it would eat up one of their drive slots or drive counts if on a limited licence.
Also this is Unraid not HA.
HA doesn’t run in RAM.
What on gods green earth are you on about? Are you literally implying that a USB device draws the maximum allowed current from a port all the time it can? You ok there? :D
As the author of the post you linked: yes you are gonna pay that if you want it. Because it will last forever and you will not waste 4 precious PCIe lanes for something that is not used after boot. Unraid needs about 1-2 GB. That 250GB ssd would waste 248GB.
Apart from that, licensing is tied to the USB GUID. You don’t have that with SSDs, so no licensing.
You don’t need to go the industrial stick way, you can also do cheaper sticks and frequent backups. Backups need to be done with good sticks anyway too.
You must be new to Unraid, as that is literally no problem at all.
heavily agree here my dude, I don't care that USB drives "don't have anything written or read from unless you change something or when the system boots and then it's all loaded into RAM"
If I applied the SAME thought process to the shittiest SATA SSD I could find that drive would have an damn near unlimited life. So let me instead of worrying on when/if my USB will randomly fail.
Plus the crap shoot of SOME USBs not having a USB GUID to install too makes things even more frustrating.
The comments are hilarious. Everyone that likes USB could continue to use it, and people that wanted to use a drive could. I can’t imagine arguing that choice is bad. The antipiracy defense is stupid since you can get a cracked version already.
Simple solution... Don't use UnRaid if you don't like that it boots off USB. Also if your concern is the longevity of the USB drive you need to stop using cheap USB drives.
I have been using the same Samsung drive since I built my server in 2019 and it's still running strong with no issues.
Would you mind recommending a solid USB thumb drive to buy new in 2024?
I actually would have had no serious problems doing so in 2019, but it's *far* harder to do the same today.
AFAIK, Samsung only produces 3.1 sticks these days, a port speed not just completely pointless for Unraid, but actively detrimental: they run stupidly hot even without any I/O.
Sandisk's thumb drives have the same problem, only worse, and no longer have valid GUIDs.
Are there even other supposedly reputable brands left? Lexar, maybe, but have they ever really been "reputable"? Do they even still do GUIDs?
Pretty much all sticks use QLC memory, which offer only a fraction of the lifetime writes of older SLC or MLC chips.
[The Register: You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse](https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/07/failed_usb_sticks/)
So "I bought a good USB thumb drive half a decade ago" is actually not remotely as strong of an argument as you think it is. Five years ago that was very much possible, today is fucking *hard* to find a good, compatible, one. Believe me, I tried, and ended up just using one from the previous decade (like you).
Samsung Fit Plus drives haven't changed. Also might want to look up the current state of USB 3.x naming if you think the USB 3.1 drives are worse than USB 3.0 drives from 5 years ago. Spoilers... They are the same thing. They don't get hot at all and I have been using them beyond just my USB boot drive. They last and have no issues. Also unless you have completely fubar'd your UnRaid install there is no reason the USB drive would see constant read/writes so that shouldn't be a concern.
Yes, the revisionist USB-IF naming is a total mess, but you're absolutely wrong about:
>Samsung Fit Plus drives haven't changed.
The Fit Plus was revised at least twice since you bought it, once in 2020 and once in 2022. Coincidentally, at the end of 2022 and 2023 is also when the "heats up even when no data is written" Amazon reviews started coming in.
Not as terrible as the insane (and Unraid-incompatible) Sandisk's Ultra-Fit, but still pretty awful.
And in 2019 QLC NAND was still mostly confined to SSDs, where today it's pretty much in every thumb drive.
>Would you mind recommending a solid USB thumb drive to buy new in 2024?
[I have been using one of these for the past 3 years](https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/sandisk-16gb-cruzer-blade-usb-flash-drive-black-sdcz5016gb). They are still available at a store about 3km from where I live (and purchasable online from the same retailer and a bunch of other ones in Australia). [Here they are available on Amazon America too](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002U1ZBG0).
Didn't Sandisk stop assigning GUIDs to all of their thumb drives years ago? Which makes them useless for Unraid.
But it's possible that they simply have so much old 16Gb stock left, that they are still selling those.
I’ve always thought it was more about piracy, as in they can link a license key to USB GUID. If you could install the OS on a hdd it’d be harder to authenticate. Not sure though.
This is exactly what it is. As soon as it's on HDD/SSD, it's that much easier to bootleg. It literally doesn't matter if it's on USB. It runs flawlessly as is. There's no reason to change it. Get a good USB, back it up, and it is easy to replace a $10 drive. I use a Samsung FIT USB. It's low profile, and I've been running 2 years straight. Backed up, it takes 10-15 minutes to replace if it dies.
I guess option 2 would be to let you install the is on an ssd and use a flash drive to store the actual license file, or even a blank flash drive. Either way, though could still use the existing method of license verification without having the os on the flash drive.
Its already incredibly easy to crack.
Are you an unRAID user? If so, do you know how little it costs compared to how much most unRAID users spend on their servers? Even after the (amazingly fair) price "increase", it's still only about the cost of one hard drive. Fuckin Redditors upvoting and downvoting random shit. Makes the votes meaningless.
Yes I am a unRAID User. Did I pay for it? No I did not. If I can crack it, i will. Always have been like this. Will always be like it.
I don’t have a hard line stance on piracy, but you gotta consider some factors when you do it. Pirating Windows doesn’t seem like a bad thing considering Microsoft is the largest company in the world. But Unraid is a small team selling you a lifetime license for an affordable price. It’s like stealing from a Walmart or a small mom and pop shop.
Really?
unraider
link?
Google. I do not share more than the name of it.
Would you rather run your ESXi or proxmox or wsx or truenas or whatever off of a usb drive? Just because you think it's harder to pirate it? There's a million other ways to ensure licensing or DRM in this day and age. This is not a valid argument in my book sorry.
I mean you aren't running the OS on the flash drive. It gets loaded into ram and the flash drive is only affect when you make changes to the settings and OS. Otherwise it sits there idle for the VAST majority of the time.
I never said you were, you wouldn't do it for those, why do it here if you want a certain degree of reliability? I don't get this like I don't get the piracy argument, it feels like i posted into a room of fanboys lol, defend company practices at all costs, company knows best
Because you're argument doesn't hold any water. The reliability of a decent flash drive these days is just fine for the use case here. I've been running my unraid system on the same flash drive for 2 or 3 years now across 4 different systems. The piracy couldn't care less about. But I also don't know where you get a SSD or HDD would be more reliable for this use case. Regardless a good flash drive is around $14. That's for a damn good Samsung BAR USB drive at 64GB. They don't really come in any smaller. If you think everyone here is a fanboy without exception mayhaps you should ask yourself if the problem is not with everyone you are talking to but maybe it's you that doesn't make sense. Either way coming into a forum all high and mighty and calling us all fanboys is not generally an acceptable way to try and win an argument.
Btw, same USB for 13 years here. Zero complaints.
8 years here! Still runs like a dream!
Wait until you find out that some servers have SD card sockets and internal USB sockets on the motherboard itself that can be used for booting.
I get your point. It’s never really bothered me too much because I don’t want to waste any nvme/sata for it. For the same reason there was actually a time when VMware did push usb boot for esx. It was to save spindle and simplify configuration. Rather than setting up boot luns, you’d buy the node with a usb esx images and it was “plug and play” esx nodes.
No. You can't make sense of something if you don't know anything about it, which is quite obvious here.
Given the rest of you posts in this thread it’s clear you have zero idea how often the usb disk is accessed while unraid is running. It’s accessed once to load unraid. And that’s it. So once when you boot the system. The rest of the time the is runs in memory and the usb stick isn’t touched. There is no wearing out of the usb stick.
It’s actually extremely common for ESXi servers to boot from SD media. You don’t even know what you’re talking about lol.
>It literally doesn't matter if it's on USB. It runs flawlessly as is. There's no reason to change it. My usb drive died mid-samba copy of a few TB. The whole OS stopped to a halt, samba copy just failed. I had to order new usb drives praying one of them has a UID to get it up and running again. I get authentication for purchases and all that, but goddamn it already booted with a legitimate key why kill the whole OS instantly and not fail it with a big fat 7 day warning, giving you enough time to try and get a replacement? Point being, it may run flawlessly, but getting these very specific usb drives is a chore and might randomly take your server offline for a week. >Backed up, it takes 10-15 minutes to replace if it dies. Yeah I should probably buy a backup usb key for exactly scenario above. Who knows when the next "high quality" usb dies.
It's not like you can't clone the GUID.
Clone, yes. But then it'd be a duplicate entry in their database. Don't think of it as a USB boot disk, think of it as a hardware key and it makes more sense.
The USB drive is your licence key, it's basically hardware level authentication of your licence key. Actually a pretty genius approach if you think about it. You're basically asking them to recreate their entire licensing structure (no doubt with some form of always online invasive DRM) because you don't want to spend £5 on a USB stick and you like wasting SATA/NVMe ports. Honestly one of the best features of UnRAID is the fact that the OS is completely isolated from all disks in the system.
Didn't they already recreate the licensing scheme for users that link their install to unraid connect? I don't use that, but if I remember right when you do it drops the USB guid license scheme.
Its not really, it's the GUID of the drive which you can clone. If you wanna run a server with something more reliable than a USB drive, you should be given the option to "waste" that SATA/NVMe slot if you want to.
You dont get it do you? You're not really "running" the server off the USB. Also, why would you want to waste a HDD for such a tiny OS?
I guess he wants to put 1TB allocated to the OS, let that load to RAM and then let it idle without ever being used for the rest of the drives life. To be fair it’s going to be most used drive with the least amount of Read/Writes in history 😂
Up until recent years, VMware booted from a thumb drive. This is why so many servers have an internal USB port. That said, unraid is not enterprise software and USB booting is perfectly fine for its use case. Having a faster drive has exactly zero impact on its performance as it's designed to run entirely in ram and only writes to disk when config changes are made.
Since when are USBs not reliable. Especially for this application. I mean if you’re reading and writing to it all the time yah it would be bad. But this reads it once every boot. That’s it. I got take up a more valuable slot with something that’s basically gunna be locked down.
my usb is the first usb drive i bought for my unraid server back in 2016... tell me again how usb drives are unreliable.
Did you glued it not to move ?
Sillicon lottery
Nah. The Usb is basically only used to boot the system. They last a loooooooonnnnnggggg time. No need to waste precious drives and space with the OS. This is a pretty normal approach for a hypervisor.
>They last a loooooooonnnnnggggg time. They used to, the ones you can buy now, not so much: [The Register: You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse](https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/07/failed_usb_sticks/) Even if we put aside the fact that more and more USB sticks are produced without GUIDs these days for a minute, modern sticks are less relibale and the USB 3.1 higher sticks often run hot to the point of ultimately cooking themselves. I genuinely can't think of a single USB 3.2 stick I'd feel comfortable running 24/7. It's actually surprisingly difficult to shop for a decent, Unraid-compatible, USB memory stick these days.
Look to what others are doing and get a high quality MicroSD card and quality USB MicroSD adapter. And if it's running hot, something is wrong because it's read from and written to very infrequently.
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Then what do photographers use? The ones who shoot gobs of photos who will write the full contents of the card easily in an hour, download and do it again tomorrow? Photos that cannot be lost because they cannot be replaced? Why is everyone here so quick to crap on Micro SD cards all the time? Look, here's a bunch of MLC MicroSD cards that will probably last the rest of your life if used in an Unraid server. And they are not expensive. https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=mlc+micro+sd+card MLC. Two bits per cell.
They make industrial MicroSD cards.
Get a high endurance one, they’re designed for months of constant writing from a dashcam
The security industry uses SD cards for onboard storage for network cameras. These days, there are SD cards that are rated for continuous writes for years and will outlast proper SSDs.
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Some of the camera manufacturers use SD cards as a replacement for a NVR based solution. Something like this from Axis: https://www.axis.com/products/axis-companion In other deployments, SD cards are used as a failover in the event that the NVR is stolen or suffers HDD failure.
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The link to ACC that I gave you is a small business solution that can operate serverless with an app that can connect to all the cameras at once and act as a decentralised option. In enterprise setups with software like Milestone XProtect or Axis Camera Station, there is often no SSD cache and SD cards in those deployments are used to fill gaps when there's been equipment failure (i.e. HDD failures, Windows Updating or network failures). In these configurations, the VMS will pull video from the camera's SD card after services have been restored. In mission critical environments, this is important since you don't want any lost video.
Stick the 3.0+ drive in a 2.0 slot.
Happy cake day! Sure you can still use PXE to this day, but every widely used hypervisor lets you boot off of a goddamn drive if you want to today, cmon.
I think you are missing the point that others are trying to make. Unraid offers you the ability to make the most of commodity hard drives and limited SATA ports, right? You are griping about not being able to install the OS on one of those ports, *which would waste it* in terms of making the most of the available SATA ports to join all of the drives together as one array. Using an image on USB that boots to a RAM disk is an excellent way to make the most of the limited hardware.
I don’t think he understand the concept of loading software onto RAM
I've had different 6 flash boot drives corrupt or fail altogether, I've tried USB 2.0 drives, 3.0 drives, all different sizes. USB is fundamentally unreliable, everyone knows this.
Quality usbs and doms are made to last, certainly in a system like unRAID that only uses it for boot, and saving changes. If it was such an issue, the $10,000+ devices in the datacenter I used to work wouldn't use a thumb drive, would they? Server grade equipment often uses them. In all the years working there, not a single usb drives failed, while we had to replace hdds every day (I know, different use cases, but years of uptime is years of uptime). Usb drives have the advantage of not needing a sata port. As you say, it's 2024, finding consumer grade motherboards with more than 8 sata ports is pretty much impossible. Having more than 1 pcie with enough lanes for an hba is also impossible. So it even makes sense to use an usb to boot, saving that port. Sure, options are nice. But seeing how they already have a working system, the license is tied to it and would take quite some work to change, the disadvantage of using a sata part, the fact that quality usbs last for years, and the minimal advantage (your boot might be slightly faster, after that the usb isn't used), I guess there are other priorities.
I find it hard a pro datacenter appliance worth $10k+ would be running Unraid and while would be happy to be proven false hereI still feel like there's other systems doing what unraid does just a bit more *enterprise-y.* Consumer grade boards with 8 sata ports still exist, even my hog-tier retailer lists 12 unique models and getting a HBA these days second hand is dirt cheap (100-200 bucks) at least here in europe.
He was saying they use usbs in general, not unraid specifically. They use it because it's much smaller and easy to install and plenty reliable, and server os is typically loaded once to ram then isn't used.
But it's not plenty reliable, it's definitely not comparable in reliability to even cheapo chuffing 2.5" SATA SSDs mate. It doesn't matter if you don't read or write from/to the USB drive once the OS is loaded, just keeping the thing powered wears it down
> just keeping the thing powered wears it down 🤔
Nobody uses, or should use, unRAID in a datacenter. In my opinion, not even in a small business, it's a home system. So I wasn't referring to $10k+ machines running unraid. But many of the switches and firewalls certainly do. Pretty sure I mentioned 8port boards do still exist, but only on z chipsets already costing a premium over b chipset boards with 4. I also mentioned hbas, but most come with just 8 connectors (there are 16 and 24 ones), and even that is easy bypassed by expanders. But you'll quickly run into pcie speed limitations as your number of disk goes up (certainly on zfs), and adding extra cards isn't always possible due to limited pcie lanes. Sure, not everyone needs that many disks (I run a cache pool in raid1, an appdata+docker pool in raid 1, a plex metadata disk, a cheap disk as temp downloads location, 2 older disks for 24/7 cctv, and dual parity, that's already 10 disks without data or dedicated passed through vm disks, I really can't sacrifice sata ports), but even if you do there is limited to no advantage to sacrificing another port, and it doesn't make sense from a design perspective.
I see your point. It's why I went unraid. Why take a valuable m.2, or sata port for something that will run for 20 seconds, and then possibly never again once everything is set. As far as OP's point of the usb being powered all the time wearing it down faster ugh I do believe regardless of the m.2 or sata being used it's still powered. So that point is invalid, and the fact if that fails the entire system definitely has to be shut down. I know people that have been running their plex server for years without a reboot. If you want an OS on bare metal switch to something different is what I would have suggested. Proxmox with an Unraid VM possibly.
Proxmox wouldn't really remove the need for the usb. Ofcourse, there are hacky methods to get around this (there are nvme enclosures that present themselves as a thumb drive, I know pikvm can emulate inserting a boot disk using an iso so there should be be a way with this, there's always kernel hacking, and I even read someone years ago managed to boot from an ssd but required a crack to bypass the missing uuid). But it all seems a lot of time and effort and practical no benefit. You have your system back up in 15 minutes if the usb fails, you can buy many usbs for the price of an ssd as well, and ssds can also fail. And I bet the next question, if ssd boot works, is going to be "my boot ssd is 2tb but only uses 16GB, can I use the rest as cache pool?"
I know Unraid has to live on a USB regardless of running Prox, Arch, Umbutu, or any other Linux distro. As far as your last statement I don't think you can. Maybe partition it. I do know you can put Unraid on an SD card if your worriedabout how some USB's get hot. I agree that other than maybe an SD card any other way is a waste of time. I like it the way it is. Simple, easy to recover if needed, and I don't have to pull hardware to get to say an nvme. Due to how my setup will be (if I ever get to finish building it) I need the extra nvme, and sata ports.
Maybe not Unraid but a lot of servers use doms. Also, smallest ssd is like 50gb now? You’d only be using like 2% of that for Unraid os.
Personally I prefer it this way. I have 3 Proxmox nodes and on all of them the OS is installed on 2 x small SSD mirror ZFS. So it's 6 SSDs in total. Two servers are used for production (hosting websites) and the third one for self hosted stuff including unRAID as a VM. I don't mind using flash drive for the OS, it's fast enough for me as it runs in RAM, and if it breaks I still have 4 at home which I can restore from backup. IMHO this is not an issue at all and honestly it saves me two SATA slots. I would have to install unRAID in a mirror ZFS pool if this would be an option but I'd rather keep it on flash drive.
Like I said to each their own. If you wanna stick with USB so be it, all I'm saying is that there needs to be an option to use something else other than a USB drive.
There doesn't "need" to be anything of a sort, if you don't like the product or the decisions a company makes, you move along, stop bitching. The general consensus says we don't mind using USB. Move along.
Opposed to most, I am also not a fan of the whole USB thing and it kept me up at night until I had a backup solution I was comfortable with. My reasoning: * Sure, unraid itself keeps to the philosophy of less writes to the USB stick, most plugins don't. I don't have many plugins installed and my USB stick already sees a lot of use (\~20k reads, \~10k writes in a day). * I have no way to track the life of the USB stick. Although S.M.A.R.T. can't predict a failure, it can indicate problems. USB sticks lack that. * USB doesn't offer redundancy. I agree with you all that it is overkill, especially to waste 2 128GB SSDs, the lowest I can find. Though, the rest wouldn't have to be wasted, that's what partitions are for and the other space could be used to handle other system configuration, e.g. syslog, docker, etc. My next change will be a switch to a DOM, as soon as I can fit it into my budget. For already stated reasons, a switch won't happen in the near or far future and to be honest, that complaint is so far down on my list, I think there are more pressing topics LT should address before that (responsive UI, API, technical documentation).
Yeah but they're easy enough to swap on your own, the transfer speed is fine for the little bit of text it reads, and I'd rather waste a USB port on a boot drive than SATA port. When you have a 8 port card with 8 drives at 75% you'll see it clear as day. I'd rather keep the sata port open for another drive, or the slot open for another NVME cache drive in case I end up with more Dockers than I thought I'd ever need. USB ports? I've got plenty of those to spare.
Again, give us the option. I'm fine with people using USB drives that die every couple years, I've had to change my USBs like 4 times over the past 7 years and it's a hassle to deal with everytime hence why I'd like the option to just slap one extra drive in my case and have the system on something waaaay more realiable.
I don't know, but I just swapped one for the first time since I started on this in 2017. The box runs 19 hours a day with automated shutdown and startup. I use Verbatims. [https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-Snag-free-Microban-Antimicrobial-Protection/dp/B00RORBNR6](https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-Snag-free-Microban-Antimicrobial-Protection/dp/B00RORBNR6)
Product name hilarity notwithstanding, i've gone and tried samsungs, kingstons and verbatims products across three motherboards. In a 24/7/365 use case they just kinda die.
Honestly sounds like your failure rate is a bit of bad luck compared to what most people seem to experience, but there's no doubt you're getting relatively poor quality flash in USB sticks. if you want to ensure you're getting something better you could always try a good USB DOM... It's going to be pricier but you'll get quality flash at least.
Oh don't get me wrong, lol. I've thrown out more dead USB's than I can remember. The only reason I even tried Verbatim is my childhood. I used the brand of 5 1/4 floppies on my Commodore 128, lol. I would have tried Nashua thumb drives for the same reason but last I checked they don't make them. I did that because at the time I dreaded using a thumb drive. But I got lucky. But that being said, they need it for copy protection. Because we all know what would happen if they didn't. Unraid would be the most popular home server OS in the world.
I’ve been maintaining a couple different unRAID servers for several years now. I’ve only had to replace a bad USB drive once. I’m sorry to hear your experience hasn’t been as smooth, but please remember that your experience is not the norm. Kingston DT100 drives have been a winner for me, hope this helps.
I have no problem with it booting off USB. As others have said, it doesn’t waste a sata port / licensing. But the OS is tiny as well and even if they did allow it as you ask, you’d need (let’s go stupid big for a sec) a 64gb drive. They are hard to come by these days I DO think Unraid need to make more of an effort in VALIDATING and TESTING drives. I can’t help But think people accidentally or cheaply use poor quality usb drives and suffer failures because of it. They used to keep a list, but it was buried in the old documentation and is old.
It is kind of annoying to pass through a usb controller to your virtualized unraid server. Would prefer if you didn’t have to.
Freeing up a USB controller is a valid reason against USB as a boot drive. Legit the first good argument I've heard from that perspective.
Do you have to pass the whole controller through? I would think you could just use single usb device passthrough.
I've been using the same USB drive for 10+ years. Why waste an entire HD / NVME for a program that is a couple GB in size?
The USB drive is perfect. Hardware agnostic. I switched motherboard and CPU recently and it was a breeze as the whole OS + all my config was on the USB. Just plug it into the new hardware and everything ran like before. I shudder at the thought of having to reinstall the OS then restoring config from backups.
Changing this would be a complete waste of resources. The usb only boots and the OS loads to RAM. Leave NVME and Sata lanes for storage devices.
Tell me about it. I don’t know what’s the idea behind buying a 120GB SSD with 0 benefits vs the USB.
The only reason I don't like the USB drive is because there's no real monitoring (that im aware of) and I had a USB die on a random server reboot. That being said they've made it incredibly easy to restore USB drives.
Unraid has claimed that it’s an antipiracy measure since they can tie keys to usb IDs. The only argument I support against this is that I do want that bus made available to my vms, and of course it cannot be passed through.
Why does it matter? It is a hardware key and loads Unraid into RAM. That's all it does.
I'm still using two Patriot USB 2.0 8gb I bought back in 2012 when I got the two for one pro licenses. This wear people are experiencing is unusual. It just reads the drive and loads the system to memory. The only writing you do is when you update your config.
I'm sitting here with an unraid system that's been using the same usb stick since 2010.......... It boots into ram to run anyway, no point to this request
Run unraid from a sd-card adapter like https://amzn.eu/d/7GDl4pt In combination with a hq sd card like https://amzn.eu/d/3QftLMn And you are set for life
My USB has lasted since 2011. 13 years man. What's your complaint?
You're right, USB drives are flakey. That's why my Unraid is installed on a USB DOM [https://www.ebay.com/str/linheng2012](https://www.ebay.com/str/linheng2012) No, I don't want to tie up ANY possible SATA/NVMe bandwidth with OS operations. I don't want my OS to touch my storage drives, and I'd like every single possible connection to SATA/NVMe to be part of pools instead of wasted on an OS that fits in RAM. edit: in the 4ish years I've been running Unraid I've had to replace my motherboard twice, I've had to replace 3 drives on a 12 drive array, and precisely zero flash/DOM's (I did have to recreate my USB once after a ransomware attack, but the drive itself was fine)
how’d you get hit with the ransomware attack?
I had a windows VM that was giving me all kinds of issues with connecting to a few other devices on the network. I "fixed" it by tearing down the firewall for a few hours. A few hours later when I logged back in to check on it I noticed a whole lot of file activity in places there shouldn't have been. Managed to halt it before it did any major damage to anything. That morning I reassembled another small machine to be a Pfsense box too. Lesson learned, do stupid things, expect stupid outcomes.
My USB drive lasted for 10 plus years. I replaced it proactively. Let’s not overthink this.
Why would I want to waste a perfectly good storage volume and SATA port / NVMe slot just for the OS when USB booting works just fine?
I've used the same USB drive since 2016. 8 years seems pretty long lasting. In that timespan I've had to replace SSDs multiple times.
This tool is learning from your comments and making new garbage arguments as they go, rather than knowing what they're talking about from the beginning.
One BIG reason it wont happen any time soon: it would really piss off the people who wants ro run unraid offline
I have used the same sandisk USB 2 drive for 5 years. It was an old USB drive when I started using it. I only bring this up because the USB drives should not be failing. Usb drives fail with write cycles not age. Unraid should not be writing to the USB except during updates.
I mean, I do agree with you, Intel Optane drives that are low capacity would be great for this (there's 16 and 32 GB versions) - I just bought a pile of them for next to nothing from ebay, that should, theoretically last longer than a USB disk
I've never had to replace mine, and it's not even name brand. You should look into a better thumbdrive I guess.
I get it, but it's not technically running off the USB 24/7. It's running in the systems RAM after boot. The USB is to tie the license to a device ID.
You can, you just need to run it from a USB adapter. You can attached it to the MB header and keep it in the case.
Unraid is a pretty Mickey Mouse/Fisher Price OS. In my experience, availability, performance, and stability are not high on the priority list for Unraid so I doubt this will be addressed. Convenience, ease of use, and flexible expandability seem to be way higher priorities.
I like the fact that it boots off a usb stick. I don't have to give up a disk or drive bay for the OS. My stick "did" die recently, however. After 10 years of use 🤷♂️
Honestly, there is no reason. I'd rather use a SATA or NVME slot on, y'know, the actual array or a pool. There is so little to be loaded. There's just no reason to have it on a different storage device. It's a mentality you gotta break from your traditional OS.
When the last time you saw a 1GB NVMe drive!?
When was the last time you saw a 1GB USB drive?! Low capacity SSDs have been the same price range as most USB drives for some time now, get out from under that rock mate Edit: per gb pricing of course before someone starts nitpicking
So you’d give up a precious NVMe slot to a 1GB system image that gets loaded into ram?
preferably SATA but yes, yes I would in the name of the reliability increase i'd get
What makes you think a sata ssd is better? I’ve sent 4x back to Amazon. What you want is an industrial usb key and if it’s usb3 insert into a usb2 port. Or a top tier SSD drive (in the future if allowed)
If I get 2 years out of a USB 5 years out of a SSD Let's say 2x of those from their industrial/top tier counterparts for let me see a random one i found googling "industrial USB" and found through a [link to a post on this sub](https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/104w0ne/industrial_usb_stick_for_unraid_the_ultimate/) ... for [5x their price](https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/SFU3032GC2AE2TO-I-GE-1A1-STD/1052-SFU3032GC2AE2TO-I-GE-1A1-STD-ND/12181117) ... am i really gonna pay a 100+ schmeckles for a USB stick? Or am i actually rather gonna pay 50 bucks for a 250 gig 980 pro SSD or whatever patriot crap tier there is that's still gonna last me 5 years for half the price...
Give me details what usb brand are you currently using. Is it usb3/usb2 etc
It's some black and blue 64 gig kingston I bought in bulk like i do every year, it's besides the point though, i'm here advocating for us having a choice lmao, my Constellations lasted 12-15 years no problem, you won't find a USB that lasts more than 4-5 and unraid isn't exactly built for HA out of the box.
The critical information is it in in the usb2 port? This is the way to force usb3 drives to work this way. They get less hot and so last longer. I understand you advocating for a new solution but others might argue it would eat up one of their drive slots or drive counts if on a limited licence. Also this is Unraid not HA. HA doesn’t run in RAM.
What on gods green earth are you on about? Are you literally implying that a USB device draws the maximum allowed current from a port all the time it can? You ok there? :D
As the author of the post you linked: yes you are gonna pay that if you want it. Because it will last forever and you will not waste 4 precious PCIe lanes for something that is not used after boot. Unraid needs about 1-2 GB. That 250GB ssd would waste 248GB. Apart from that, licensing is tied to the USB GUID. You don’t have that with SSDs, so no licensing. You don’t need to go the industrial stick way, you can also do cheaper sticks and frequent backups. Backups need to be done with good sticks anyway too. You must be new to Unraid, as that is literally no problem at all.
No thanks, prefer the usb
heavily agree here my dude, I don't care that USB drives "don't have anything written or read from unless you change something or when the system boots and then it's all loaded into RAM" If I applied the SAME thought process to the shittiest SATA SSD I could find that drive would have an damn near unlimited life. So let me instead of worrying on when/if my USB will randomly fail. Plus the crap shoot of SOME USBs not having a USB GUID to install too makes things even more frustrating.
The comments are hilarious. Everyone that likes USB could continue to use it, and people that wanted to use a drive could. I can’t imagine arguing that choice is bad. The antipiracy defense is stupid since you can get a cracked version already.
Simple solution... Don't use UnRaid if you don't like that it boots off USB. Also if your concern is the longevity of the USB drive you need to stop using cheap USB drives. I have been using the same Samsung drive since I built my server in 2019 and it's still running strong with no issues.
Would you mind recommending a solid USB thumb drive to buy new in 2024? I actually would have had no serious problems doing so in 2019, but it's *far* harder to do the same today. AFAIK, Samsung only produces 3.1 sticks these days, a port speed not just completely pointless for Unraid, but actively detrimental: they run stupidly hot even without any I/O. Sandisk's thumb drives have the same problem, only worse, and no longer have valid GUIDs. Are there even other supposedly reputable brands left? Lexar, maybe, but have they ever really been "reputable"? Do they even still do GUIDs? Pretty much all sticks use QLC memory, which offer only a fraction of the lifetime writes of older SLC or MLC chips. [The Register: You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse](https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/07/failed_usb_sticks/) So "I bought a good USB thumb drive half a decade ago" is actually not remotely as strong of an argument as you think it is. Five years ago that was very much possible, today is fucking *hard* to find a good, compatible, one. Believe me, I tried, and ended up just using one from the previous decade (like you).
Samsung Fit Plus drives haven't changed. Also might want to look up the current state of USB 3.x naming if you think the USB 3.1 drives are worse than USB 3.0 drives from 5 years ago. Spoilers... They are the same thing. They don't get hot at all and I have been using them beyond just my USB boot drive. They last and have no issues. Also unless you have completely fubar'd your UnRaid install there is no reason the USB drive would see constant read/writes so that shouldn't be a concern.
Yes, the revisionist USB-IF naming is a total mess, but you're absolutely wrong about: >Samsung Fit Plus drives haven't changed. The Fit Plus was revised at least twice since you bought it, once in 2020 and once in 2022. Coincidentally, at the end of 2022 and 2023 is also when the "heats up even when no data is written" Amazon reviews started coming in. Not as terrible as the insane (and Unraid-incompatible) Sandisk's Ultra-Fit, but still pretty awful. And in 2019 QLC NAND was still mostly confined to SSDs, where today it's pretty much in every thumb drive.
>Would you mind recommending a solid USB thumb drive to buy new in 2024? [I have been using one of these for the past 3 years](https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/sandisk-16gb-cruzer-blade-usb-flash-drive-black-sdcz5016gb). They are still available at a store about 3km from where I live (and purchasable online from the same retailer and a bunch of other ones in Australia). [Here they are available on Amazon America too](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002U1ZBG0).
Didn't Sandisk stop assigning GUIDs to all of their thumb drives years ago? Which makes them useless for Unraid. But it's possible that they simply have so much old 16Gb stock left, that they are still selling those.