Miss_Sissy

I think that's a solid choice. I have nothing against mass-market flash drives; I have a small tackle box filled with them (currently 19 drives in it, but some scattered about the house). They are fine for transitory, non-critical applications such as installing the Linux-du-jour or moving data to air-gapped systems. I agree, and I try to live by the rule "if you don't criticize my choices, I won't criticize yours."

That's like you telling a professional photographer "I have a lot more faith in Kodak that some unknown company named 'Leica' selling a magic-bean camera." ATP has been around since 1991, focusing on the industrial marketplace since 2011. They are sold by Mouser, DigiKey, and Avnet, all of which cater to professional electrical engineers. There's nothing "snake-oil" about ATP's industrial drives, as any competent EE could tell you. Their SLC NAND, SSD-style controllers, performance, endurance, MTBF, extended temperature range, etc. are all in line with competing drives from Swissbit, Delkin Devices, and Amtron (let me guess -- you also think that those are 'unknown companies' selling "snake-oil USB keys"). I can't argue with such rigorous stastical analysis carried out on such a large sample set. Having more NASs doesn't increase uptime. It decreases it. You might take out fewer services down when one NAS fails, but more boxes doesn't lead to less downtime. If the NAS supporting your security cameras fails while you are on travel, it will be of little comfort to know that your Plex media server is still up and running. Having spare USB flash drives at home does no good if you are not at home to flash and install them. Don't you ever travel? Can't you imagine being out of town for business, a vacation, a wedding, or a funeral? Some people would rather have a toolbox drawer full of $.88 Chinese screwdrivers than one set of Snap On screwdrivers. To each his/her own.

So the inconvenience and frustration of your NAS going down in an unscheduled manner, not to mention your actual labor, is worth less than $60 to you? I'd happily pay an extra couple of hundred dollars to avoid that situation, partly because the failure could happen while I was out of town for business, a wedding or a funeral, or on vacation. I cringe at the thought of writing something like this: "It sounds like the NAS thumb drive is corrupt. I can fix it when I return home next Wednesday. Until then, all backups to the NAS will fail. Bitwarden password additions and changes won't sync between devices. You won't be able to access any of the home security cameras because they rely on Shinobi Pro which runs on the Unraid NAS. All of our movies and TV shows on the Plex server will inaccessible. Our shared music library will also be inaccessible. You won't have access to any of your files, or our shared files, that are only on the NAS and you won't be able to write new ones to it. I'm sure that there are other things out of commission that I have not thought of. But I saved $60 on our $1,600 NAS! Aren't you proud of me?" Yeah, that would go over like a lead balloon. That's what I call "faith-based engineering." I don't do that. If I didn't care about reliability and maximizing up-time, I would not have five 18TB enterprise class drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration. Any two of those drives can fail without the NAS going down, but the boot flash drive is a single point of failure, so I'm sure not going to cheap out on that device.

What is your time worth?

I am not up for a game of 'here's my anecdote -- where is your data?' This has dragged on too long already, likely to the annoyance of others. Let's drop it before the moderators ask us to. In closing, buy whatever flash drive you want. For me, the best choice was the 4GB ATP NANODURA SLC industrial drive. For you, it might be something else.

Yes, I bought the 4GB B800Pi model ATP NANODURA drive. Unraid's flashing utility recognized it by brand and model and wrote to it without any issues.

That's probably because people normally use flash drives for as sneaker-net-style media rather than archival storage. That said, the Unraid forums are filled with messages about data corruption on flash drives. It's an improvement over a write-once strategy, even though it does nothing to address wear levelling. But you can't start with a $7 thumb drive and then format and rewrite your way to SLC industrial drive levels of endurance, data retention, and lifespan. For me, paying $67 for the ATP NANODURA industrial drive and then formatting and writing it just one time made the most sense. Both my peace of mind and my time have value. Also, I'd feel pretty stupid if a failed $7 consumer thumb drive took down a $1600+ Unraid NAS that I built to survive two simultaneous hard drive failures.

But the difference is that SSDs employ sophisticated controllers with functions like "patrol read" to refresh data cells before they become unreadable: The above quote from this article: https://www.ssstc.com/knowledge-detail/patrol-read-ssd-integrity/ Obviously that won't work on an SSD that's sitting unpowered in a drawer for a decade, but if you power it on, even if just occasionally, it can perform that sort of self-repair.

That’s up to 10 years, whether powered or unpowered. As you no doubt know, being powered doesn’t slow the charge leakage within the NAND cells. Nor does reading the data. You really need to rewrite the data in order to refresh it.

Conventional flash drives (AKA thumb drives), including geniuine SanDisk, are not designed for long-term data storage. As Integral Memory's website says: Note the highlighting, which is mine. While 10 years sounds like long time, "up to 10 years" could be far less. I'm risk-averse when it comes to NAS reliability, so I went with the ATP NANODURA, which I mentioned in a post above.

Sounds fancy and looks plain. It's largely bare metal, which aids heat dissipation. It's a product designed by engineers rather than styled by marketers, and I like that. Unraid activation was problem-free with Unraid's flashing utility recognizing the make as ATP and the model as NANODURA. The GUID was accepted without issue. It's published speed specs are sequential read at up to 19MByte/s and sequential write up to 17MByte/s, which seem in line with my casual observations. It's not a high-speed drive and has a USB 2.0 interface, but Unraid's boot image is small and the drive doesn't seem to slow anything down. I was right around 1GB, too, so this is plenty of storage for my Unraid server.

Seeing more notifications from this thread spurred me into action. I placed an order today with DigiKey for an ATP NANODURA 4GB, SLC-based, USB 2.0 industrial flash drive. It supports the S.M.A.R.T ATA feature set, has ECC, wear leveling, an endurance of up to 48TB/96TB (random and sequential write respectively) and 60,000 program/erase cycles. It has an MTBF in excess of five million hours at 25 degrees C and an operating temperature range 0f -40C to 85C. (See complete specs in attached PDFs.) It costs $67 USD, including shipping and sales tax, which is less than some competing drives from Swissbit and Apacer. It's also a modest investment compared to the overall hardware cost of my Unraid NAS (5 x 18TB Seagate Exos drives, a pair of 2280 form factor SSDs, case, power supply, motherboard, RAM, cables, etc.). To each his or her own; I'm just sharing my choice, not telling others that their choices are wrong. nanodura-trade-series-spec.pdf ATP NANODURA technical specs.pdf

There are people who strongly doubt that we actually landed a man on the moon, but it doesn't make it any less true. 😀 When you return a failed $7 thumb drive to Amazon, Best Buy, Target, etc., it does not get flown back to China, South Korea, etc. for failure analysis and teardown. It either gets tossed in the trash or sold on a pallet full of untested customer returns. No manufacturer sees $7 flash drives again after they leave the factory, whether they are genuine or counterfeit. Limetech said that they don't know if the non-serialized (via GUID) SanDisk flash drives are genuine or counterfeit, but SanDisk will not respond to them. Do you have information indicating that genuine SanDisk thumb drives all still have unique GUIDs? https://exceptionaltiming.com/15-ways-to-know-if-a-timex-watch-is-an-original/ But I agree with that general point you were making about the price. I could understand counterfeiting high capacity thumb drives, where the retail price is high enough to make it worthwhile. But Best Buy has a 32GB SanDisk - Cruzer Glide thumb drive for $7.19. I'm just not seeing any real margin at that end of the market, especially since the counterfeiters would have to amortize the cost of molds over such a small number of drives (relative to what SanDisk sells). If you are a Chinese counterfeiter, you're much better off remarking $0.50 NE5532 opamps as something like $6 OPA2134s. No retail packaging required. No plastic molds. Hundreds of them can be shipped in a few IC tubes. And there is almost zero chance they will be spotted as counterfeit at the port of entry.

Even some flash drive models that had unique GUIDs in the past now do not, likely due to late-stage capitalism squeezing manufacturers to save fractions of pennies per unit. (Should we start a thread listing models of computer cases that do not have removable drive caddies?)

I must have missed that part of your earlier message. Didn't you write that USB flash drive failure is a foregone conclusion ("When (not if) they fail") under Unraid? Thanks for sharing your thoughts, but I have locally hosted public and private network services for over 23 years.

Competing 4GB industrial, SLC drives from Amtron, Delkin, and Innodisk range in price from $58 to $86. If those were 'insane prices,' Avnet, DigiKey, and Mouser would not carry such products since those distributors cater to engineers who know what products like those should cost. It's a SLC-based SSD with 10-year data retention, 60,000 program/erase cycle endurance, and an MTBF of >5,000,000 hours. It has a real SSD controller with wear leveling. It's a completely different class of device than a mass-market thumb drive. Then why do so many people with name-brand, consumer-grade flash drives report failures when using them as Unraid boot drives? Unraid is not an application that writes much to the drives. It works fine if you're sitting at home with time to kill when you notice the failure. But what do you do if you are on travel and get a panicked call from your spouse saying they can't access files on the NAS they need for their work? What if you're running a public-facing mail server, web server, or FTP server? I'm not trying to convince you to move to a high-reliability/longevity industrial SLC drive if you don't feel that you need it. But the price of the recommended drive is not at all out of line for that class and capacity of storage device. ☮️

That’s exactly my point: Samsung has the flash tech to make long-lived USB drives, but they only offer it in their PRO Endurance line of MicroSDXC cards. That’s probably because most USB flash drive buyers care only about speed and price, not longevity.

In the U.S. they are not very expensive, with the 4GB version selling for about $55 (U.S. dollars) on DigiKey.

I never suggested that there just be a one-time check at boot time. Unraid could periodically, or randomly, read the GUID while it was in operation. In fact, I proposed using a USB flash drive that might mot even be formatted and writable — it would just be the source of a GUID. Absolutely unacceptable.

I've been using a Toshiba 16GB USB 2.0 flash drive on my current Unraid server. It self-identifies as "TransMemory" and the drive's pronoun is "it." If the drive becomes non-binary, I have a real problem, but at least no one has to worry about which restroom it uses.

Good advice, but I'm looking for something reliable when I'm on an extended trip far from home. Then if I'm hosting publicly facing services on my Unraid server, such as VPNs, web servers, or FTP/SFTP servers, they won't suddenly disappear for days or weeks until I return home and resuscitate my Unraid server. I suggested allowing Unraid customers to boot from any drive they wanted as long as the licensed thumb drive was plugged in. People who are fine with the way things are now could continue booting from their thumb drives while others could elect to use more reliable media like SSDs, allowing the thumb drive to be used as a form of dongle to which no data is ever written and the only thing read is the GUID.

The main issue for most people was anecdotal evidence of USB 3.0 flash drives exhibiting a higher failure rate than USB 2.0 flash drives. Or maybe Limetech had statistics that I was not aware of. I want a flash drive equivalent to the Samsung PRO Endurance MicroSDXC cards. Those sacrifice a little bit of write speed to get much greater lifespans for write-intensive uses like dash cams, body cams, and security cameras. I use them almost exclusively as the bootable primary drives on Raspberry Pi web servers that I run. I have yet to see a failure.

I was a bit thin-skinned after a miserable day of home repair, so frustration got us both. Peace, friend! ✌️

No, it has not “gotten off in the weeds.” This was never a thread of brand-agnostic USB flash drive recommendations. It’s a warning about Sandisk USB flash drives and a follow-on discussion of alternatives, including SSDs.

I agree: Unraid needs an rsync GUI, especially to enable and configure rsync as a service. rsync has been a basic part of every NAS OS I've ever run or considered, including QNAP, TrueNAS, XigmaNAS, OpenMediaVault, Synology, and Thecus. On those, it wasn't something where you had to 'roll your own' by manually enabling and configuring the rsync service from a command line or choose between multiple Docker rsync implementations. This should be a pretty easy feature to implement, so I hope that Limetech sees fit to make it a standard part of Unraid.