Lolight

For a replacement stick choose a quality one, meaning an industrial USB flash drive.

Unfortunately iTracker isn't available as a public download -- you're correct that the product page exists but provides no download link. The only way to obtain it is by contacting Innodisk's web request team directly through their website contact form. In my experience they responded in 3 days. Be prepared to provide some information about yourself -- they asked for a company name and its address before sending the file. If providing that information isn't something you're comfortable with, feel free to send me a PM -- I'm happy to share my copy of iTracker with any forum member who needs it. The iTracker output on purchased units from the listing confirms 99.93% health and average erase count of 2 across all 8 tested drives -- factory new condition on every unit tested. A count of 2 is factory quality control testing and firmware initialization.

I'll make an attempt at explaining it, but let's get your current upgrade sorted first. Once everything is stable and the Sony is sent to its well-deserved retirement, let me know and I'll walk through what's likely behind its unusual longevity. Or show how to achieve similar longevity in the replacement drive. Don't just go out and buy another one without knowing the details

Yes, an 8GB capacity is more than enough for Unraid. Your planned combo of the SanDisk MobileMate on a USB 2.0 port paired with the industrial MLC card is a good setup. The MobileMate card reader should have a unique serial number (+VID/PID) Unraid requires for its license.

The occasional failure to enumerate on Windows is worth paying attention to -- that's an early warning signal of a drive approaching end of reliable operation rather than a random quirk. A Sony flash drive from 2010 has had a good run by any measure. But 15+ years puts any consumer USB drive well past its expected service life regardless of how it appears to be performing day to day. Enumeration failures are typically the first visible symptom before more serious read/write reliability issues develop. Before your next upgrade attempt it might be worth starting fresh with a known good quality drive rather than continuing to troubleshoot around a 15 year old flash drive that's already showing warning signs. There's a "PSA in Industrial MLC" in the Pre-Sales section covering what's currently available for boot drives if you haven't seen it -- including options that should last considerably longer than the Sony has.

The Kingston DT SE9 is a reasonable choice from that recommendation era but worth verifying it's genuine before trusting it as a long term boot device. I purchased the exact same model years ago on the same forum recommendation. Two years later I discovered greenish corrosion appearing inside the metal housing near the USB connector. Running ChipGenius on it revealed a FirstChip controller -- a controller never used in genuine Kingston DT SE9 production. It was a counterfeit that had a unique GUID and passed every casual inspection. A unique GUID by itself is not confirmation of a genuine drive. Counterfeits can and do register unique GUIDs. Worth running ChipGenius or Flash Drive Information Extractor on your drive to confirm what's actually inside. Genuine DT SE9 drives used Phison or Silicon Motion controllers depending on production era -- anything else warrants investigation. And if you do end up needing a replacement for the trial or eventually for a purchased license -- there's a PSA just below this thread covering what's currently available that goes significantly beyond the 2022 recommendations.

Your USB drive is now your license anchor -- if it fails your system won't be able to validate its license on the next reboot regardless of how healthy your SSD mirror is. Worth making sure whatever is in that slot is a quality drive.

Before you grab a new flash drive for the fresh trial -- what are you planning to use? If you're going to be purchasing a license anyway it's worth starting with a quality drive rather than whatever's convenient. There's a time-sensitive opportunity just below this thread that's directly relevant: "PSA on industrial MLC..."

USB drives from 15 years ago were far more durable and ideal for Unraid. Times have changed, but you can still grab an industrial drive for a bargain (always use USB 2.0 port or motherboard header) https://forums.unraid.net/topic/199642-psa-on-industrial-mlc-usb-boot-drives-mlc-nand-end-of-life-and-last-accessible-stock/#comment-1629106

This is a community heads-up for anyone running Unraid on USB boot or planning to. The market reality Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) issued a formal End-of-Life notice in March 2026 covering all TSOP MLC NAND production. Final orders accepted until September 15, 2026. Final shipments by March 15, 2027. Samsung completed final MLC shipments in June 2026. The last major MLC producers are done. What this means practically -- genuine industrial MLC USB drives are entering permanent scarcity. The authorized distributor price for the Innodisk 3ME (DEUA1-64GI61BW1SC) currently sits at $120 at specialist distributors and $1,252 at DigiKey for the same drive. That price trajectory reflects what the industrial procurement market already knows about what's coming. The opportunity There is currently a surplus liquidation listing on eBay for this exact drive -- 64GB Innodisk 3ME industrial MLC, purpose-built for always-on embedded applications, confirmed Toshiba MLC NAND via Flash ID decode on purchased units. The drives originated from a LYTX commercial fleet dashcam application -- hardware specified for always-on embedded duty far more demanding than a NAS boot device will ever impose. 🚨🚨 Approximately 600 units remain. eBay item 326046070546 🚨🚨 Current price: $3.99 Full specifications: https://www.innodisk.com/en/products/flash-storage/others-usb-usb-edc/usb-drive-3me The listing's order history shows multiple bulk purchases up to 200 units at once. 600 sounds like plenty until a single corporate buyer wipes out a significant portion overnight. The single digit countdown can happen faster than any forum alert can respond to. For context on why this specific drive matters for Unraid boot duty -- 3,000 P/E cycles, 60-bit ECC, metal housing, 30μ gold contacts, industrial BOM, custom industrial firmware, S.M.A.R.T. capable* Why this matters now specifically After Kioxia's March 2027 final shipment deadline new production of this NAND category ends permanently. The $3.99 price reflects surplus liquidation pricing set before the MLC EOL announcements created market awareness of the scarcity. For full technical context see: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/196967-unraid-boot-device-guide-usb-and-internal-boot-hardware-selection-and-risk-tradeoffs/ *Drive health monitoring available via Innodisk’s proprietary iTracker utility -- vendor-specific S.M.A.R.T. like metrics such as health percentage and erase count; not standard ATA S.M.A.R.T. Tool available from Innodisk support on request. This post has no commercial relationship with the seller. No affiliate links. No financial interest in purchases. Just a community heads-up on a closing window that most people won't notice until it's gone.

The read-only protection mode your drive triggered is actually a meaningful safety feature that isn't widely understood in the community. When certain USB controllers (most) detect imminent failure they lock the drive read-only specifically to preserve existing data -- sacrificing bootability to protect configuration integrity. Your situation demonstrated it working exactly as designed. It's worth noting that NVMe drives in combined boot and cache configurations don't have standardized or guaranteed equivalent “fail-safe read-only mode". Instead, behavior varies significantly by manufacturer and firmware implementation. A failing NVMe in internal boot role is less likely to lock itself in read-only state to protect your data -- it just fails by disappearing from BIOS entirely, or showing up but throwing I/O errors on both reads and writes, or becoming stuck in a reset loop. Your recovery path -- new USB, copy config, boot -- is the USB boot architecture working as intended even in failure.

Historical unreliability of the current crop of consumer USB flash is real, but the opposite is also true for higher-quality legacy MLC and current industrial MLC/SLC drives. The historical record also shows that legacy consumer USB flash drives are very reliable -- some of those are still being used as Unraid boot devices 2 decades later. fTPM licensing (if you plan on using it) adds a layer that USB licensing doesn’t have -- BIOS updates, microcode patches, or CMOS clears that can reset the identifier. But those risks are not applicable to dTPM - the discrete TPM module. I'm just trying to present a bigger picture. You can only make an informed decision when you're aware of all known pro's and con's. One more thought -- internal boot is a brand new feature. The Unraid community's own golden rule applies here as much as anywhere: new major features need time to prove themselves in real world conditions across diverse hardware configurations. You mentioned no issues with your current USB setup. That's actually the most important data point. A working system with no complaints is not a problem requiring a solution -- especially when that solution involves a fundamental architectural shift rather than a routine upgrade. Unlike a software version that can be rolled back, migrating to internal boot changes your boot architecture, your licensing anchor, and your failure domain in ways that aren't easily reversed. The long term reliability picture for internal boot won't be clear for another year or two minimum! If your USB setup works, the most defensible position right now is to wait. Let others accumulate the real world experience first. Revisit in 12-24 months when the community has long term data rather than early adopter enthusiasm

I meant given that you're still in the planning stage -- it's easier to evaluate alternatives now than after the fact. The configuration you're describing, 8GB boot partition shared with docker containers and download storage on the same NVMe, means a single drive failure loses your OS configuration and all that data at the same time. That's a huge failure spread for one physical device. A mirrored USB boot pool handles the redundancy without touching your NVMe at all. Your NVMe stays dedicated to docker and storage with its full capacity available. The two functions stay independent -- if either fails the other is unaffected. https://forums.unraid.net/topic/196967-unraid-boot-device-guide-usb-and-internal-boot-hardware-selection-and-risk-tradeoffs/

Before going further with the cache drive migration -- did you know that Unraid 7.3 actually supports a mirrored USB boot pool? Two USB drives in a ZFS mirror, redundancy against single drive failure, zero impact on your cache drive or its data. Might be worth considering given where things stand right now.

Yes it was promised here: https://newsletter.unraid.net/p/unraid-2025-year-in-review Will it actually happen? Who knows...