Comment on ICYMI, Unraid now supports internal boot and TPM licensing
dan@upvote.au 1 day ago
This is good to know. I haven’t had issues with using a USB drive though, since it doesn’t receive many reads or writes - the system is copied to a RAM drive on boot and runs off that rather than the USB.
I assume this means I’d need another drive to boot it from? My current setup is that I have 2 x 22TB drives in a ZFS mirror for data storage, and 2 x 2TB NVMe SSDs in a ZFS mirror for things like VMs, Docker containers, documents, etc.
Yeah, YMMV on the USB drive. While running Unraid for a little more than a decade, my main server chewed through around 2-3 drives causing crashes each time. It could have been bad luck with the flash lottery, though.
That is correct. You’d need a drive just for booting, outside of any array or pool that you might have. I bought a tiny 32GB Samsung mSATA SSD for $15 (new) for my transcoding server, and I somehow scored a brand new Micron 250gb 2.5 SSD for ~$25 for my main server (both from ebay) which I use for this purpose.
fonix232@fedia.io 1 day ago
An mSATA or small NVMe in a USB enclosure is the best way to go. No wasting a precious internal slot, and they can be super tiny (2230/2242 enclosures are dime a dozen).
This is actually what I did for the mSATA! I used an Eluteng USB adapter.
For my main server, though, I have a 36 + 2 2.5in bays, so I was fine using one of those bays for this.