Greetings!

I would like to know how can I make a bootable ssd so I will not run the unraid OS from a USB 3.0 drive.

It's not supported.

 

The OS itself runs completely from RAM, so there is basically zero benefit to booting from a device other than a USB flash device.  (And as a plus it frees up a SATA / nvme slot for storage)

 

3 minutes ago, audiveras said:

Greetings!

I would like to know how can I make a bootable ssd so I will not run the unraid OS from a USB 3.0 drive.

Not possible.  
 

Note that the Unraid boot process unpacks Unraid binaries from the archives on the USB drive and then Unraid runs from RAM, and during normal running there are only a small number of accesses to the USB drive relating to configuration information.

Found this guidance from 10-11 years ago that had success.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/14719-solved-installed-to-ssd-license-file-on-a-usb-drive/

 

The ideas there should apply towards the same outcome but I don't know if they still work today without someone testing and confirming it. You'd still keep a USB attached but only for retrieving the license file.

Current slackware cpio package (matches latest RC7 slackware) https://slackware.pkgs.org/15.0/slackware-x86_64/cpio-2.13-x86_64-3.txz.html

Edited May 7, 20224 yr by Trunkton

what is a pendrive and is it possible to boot from this device, I watched a video and they connected the unraid boot device somewhere on the motherboard.

3 hours ago, sheldz8 said:

what is a pendrive and is it possible to boot from this device, I watched a video and they connected the unraid boot device somewhere on the motherboard.

Read here:

 

      https://forums.unraid.net/topic/126601-sata-dom/

 

and here

 

     https://forums.unraid.net/topic/21950-usb-to-memory-card-adaptor-guid-fixed-or-dynamic-collecting-modelsoptions/page/4/#comments

 

I have used two Kingston Microcard readers in my Unraid servers for years but they are no longer available! 

 

Just be careful as if they don't have an unique GUID they can be blacklisted.  Most cheap devices (including some counterfeit USB flash drives!) don't have unique GUID numbers because of the cost for registration of those numbers. 

2024 - time to let us decide how we want to boot off a ssd or even NVME and run the OS from ram please. thumbdrives are totally useless and so unreliable. 

1 hour ago, etegration said:

2024 - time to let us decide how we want to boot off a ssd or even NVME and run the OS from ram please. thumbdrives are totally useless and so unreliable. 

Tom hinted in the Uncast video interview that the USB flash drive licensing scheme "might be expanded in the future."  What that means is as of yet unclear.

 

I have been using the same USB flash drive on one of my servers for over 10 years so I would not call that unreliable.  Having the license and configuration tied to an easily portable USB drive has made it possible to change hardware (MB, CPU, RAM, etc.) on my servers 5+ times using the same license and configuration with the same array/pool drives. 

 

For me (and this is my opinion only), I like the USB flash drive as the repository for the license, configuration and OS file which load into RAM.  Having those on an SSD/NVMe drive makes that far less portable or more to deal with when making hardware changes.

Please provide official SSD guide...

 

More and more of the newer NAS boxes (especially if they have 10Gbe) have no HDMI/display-related ports to switch boot order.  The only hope to run UNRAID on them is to swap the SSD card.  It would be nice if UNRAID had an official guide and even listed SSD's that meet its licensing requirements.  I'll get whatever is necessary so I can run UNRAID on those boxes...

6 hours ago, marc_spitzer said:

Please provide official SSD guide...

It is not officially supported (for the moment ?). So no official guide.

I would really love to have an ETA on if SSD support for the boot drive will happen if it's happening. My new NAS that I'm building only has 3 USB ports (one USB-C 4 and two USB 3 via internal header) and just do not have room for a always connected USB drive... I already will have to use a small internal adapter for things like a ZWave adapter and for plugging in my UPS... I did not know that Unraid had to be on a USB drive. I was planning to use this ~50GB Intel Optane SSD as a boot drive...

I have been messing around with True NAS Scale and I just do not like it...

21 hours ago, ETHREAL1 said:

I would really love to have an ETA on if SSD support for the boot drive will happen if it's happening. My new NAS that I'm building only has 3 USB ports (one USB-C 4 and two USB 3 via internal header) and just do not have room for a always connected USB drive... I already will have to use a small internal adapter for things like a ZWave adapter and for plugging in my UPS... I did not know that Unraid had to be on a USB drive. I was planning to use this ~50GB Intel Optane SSD as a boot drive...

I have been messing around with True NAS Scale and I just do not like it...

If I understand the reasoning correctly the main reason a USB drive is used is because many have GUID allowing an instance to be locked to a single device. I can understand this as it's a paid software model. However SSD that support GPT (which is most of them) the partitions also have GUID. Now from what I have read this is copyable but I would also argue that if Unraid supported TPM it could see that a major HW change happened and could check some repository to see if any other connected Unraid instance had the same GUID or similar and disavow both instances and shot off an email to that instance owner or something. A NAS not connected to the internet is not that helpful except for things like local SMB or the like which can be done for free and relatively easily with like TrueNAS, OMV, so on. I also actually like the idea of the GPT partition potentially being copyable. Could just make a clone of the drive and if it fails I could just plop it on another drive without having to contact support. But I digress.

I know I am pulling at straws here but I really don't like the idea of having an externally mounted boot device that can just be yanked and substituted by someone doing bad things...
On that note it would also be nice if Unraid (or really any NAS OS for that matter) supported secure boot... But I digress.

If Unraid had SSD install support tomorrow I would get an ultimate license at once... I like the UI, the flexibility, and am even willing to pay a hefty price for it but the relegation to a USB boot device it a major killer for me for multiple reasons...

Again sorry if I'm beating the horse so to speak.

Edited October 28, 20241 yr by ETHREAL1

14 minutes ago, ETHREAL1 said:

I really don't like the idea of having an externally mounted boot device that can just be yanked and substituted by someone doing bad things...

 

I'm not sure how you can prevent that, regardless of how you boot a system. You don't have to yank a USB boot disk to boot off another device. Likewise, you can boot off USB even if the system is set to boot from a different device - even if USB ports are disabled, they're easy enough to turn on. If someone has physical access to your machine, it's game over - there is no way to protect it. If that's an issue for you, then USB booting is the least of your concerns.

 

I've got Unraid installed on a machine that fits in the palm of my hand with a USB drive attached internally. If it only had a single USB port, I'd add a hub.

 

Doesn't it make a lot more sense to add a hub, internally or externally for your other devices than to try putting the Unraid boot volume on an SSD?

 

I can't imaghine the changes required to use TPM would be insignificant. Let alone the trouble-shooting and support required when things invariably go sideways for customers - those that even have a TPM chip in their systems.

 

Maybe I have the best luck in the world, because I've been using USB thumb drives for 25 years and have only ever had a single failure. A Corsair 1GB model back sometime around 2005.

 

10 minutes ago, Espressomatic said:

I'm not sure how you can prevent that, regardless of how you boot a system. You don't have to yank a USB boot disk to boot off another device. Likewise, you can boot off USB even if the system is set to boot from a different device - even if USB ports are disabled, they're easy enough to turn on. If someone has physical access to your machine, it's game over - there is no way to protect it. If that's an issue for you, then USB booting is the least of your concerns.

You can if you lock the UEFI with a password and have an OS that encrypts via TPM. aka that drive can only be read by that that MB/MB CPU combo in the case of FTPM. on some board the FTPM is also linked to the UEFI so if the CMOS is cleared you lose the TPM key and have to use a encryption recovery password. Yes if the box is stolen the HW is gone but the data would remain safe as long as they don't crack the OS login or use some other exploit like Meltdown back in the day or the like.

With that said I'm not saying that USB should be dropped, Just that other options other than USB should be available.

Also not saying that the Unraid OS should be encrypted (though it would be nice as an option) but it could still link to TPM just to detect HW change of the MB/MB CPU combo for FTPM.

LT have officially announced they were "looking into other booting options", but I wouldn't expect that to happen at high priority/before a year or 2...

16 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

LT have officially announced they were "looking into other booting options", but I wouldn't expect that to happen at high priority/before a year or 2...

Can you by chance shed some light on this? Posts? any kind of potential timeline other that maybe 2 years?
I would also hope there is going to be some way to transfer a USB install to an SSD install? If I know its coming I can deal with it in the short term.
Also I seem to also be in the boat where my MB only boots from USB when explicitly told to via boot override. I can't seem to just set it to boot off USB all the time... Probably some security measure for the board or something...

2 hours ago, ETHREAL1 said:

With that said I'm not saying that USB should be dropped, Just that other options other than USB should be available.

 

I understand where you're coming from and I've seen some other people shy away from USB boot - for any number of reasons, I haven't taken a poll to find out all the details.

 

In particular, what you've mentioned wrt TPM could be more work than it's worth. There's no way to know what Limetech is considering for non-USB boot, but there are a lot of ways to protect software keys out there.

 

The boot volume itself isn't something one would typically need encrypted, nor is it necessarily required to access (all) the data on the other attached disks. If what you mentioned about "someone else" booting the system is anything beyond a hypothetical, it sounds like maybe your requirements go beyond only booting from alternate media.

5 hours ago, Espressomatic said:

it sounds like maybe your requirements go beyond only booting from alternate media.

No more the idea is if say my house is robbed the likelihood that said crook trying to extract data past the “I can’t get it to boot my unlocked OS media” is very small, they would likely just whip the drives (if that) and sell it or the parts off. And that’s the goal, you can’t have mu data even if you get my hardware. It should also he noted that encryption does not secure data, it makes it non viable to read it in a relevant time frame. Aka by the time you can decrypt it the data is not longer relevent. But I digress.

On 5/7/2022 at 6:45 PM, Trunkton said:

Found this guidance from 10-11 years ago that had success.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/14719-solved-installed-to-ssd-license-file-on-a-usb-drive/

 

The ideas there should apply towards the same outcome but I don't know if they still work today without someone testing and confirming it. You'd still keep a USB attached but only for retrieving the license file.

Current slackware cpio package (matches latest RC7 slackware) https://slackware.pkgs.org/15.0/slackware-x86_64/cpio-2.13-x86_64-3.txz.html

Thank you for that i was able to find a slakware package for cpio:
https://pkgs.org/download/cpio

i know of a bzoverley github but it is best to use a usb disk drive.

On 10/29/2024 at 12:20 AM, bmartino1 said:

Thank you for that i was able to find a slakware package for cpio:
https://pkgs.org/download/cpio

i know of a bzoverley github but it is best to use a usb disk drive.

Examples:

 

https://github.com/toneomgomg/unRAID-bzoverlay

 

but these only kinda work, it still need to read the flash driver called unraid and when booted its still uses the flash drive for configurations...

The fact that this is still true in 2025 is absurd. Anyone who says otherwise and makes excuses for it is doing just that. The fact that I'm expected to pay $100+/yr for NAS software that CANNOT run on actual enterprise hardware is laughable.

I do not care that it can* run from USB. It's a cute feature. It's a nice addon. It is not reliable for many different reasons.

Arguments to the contrary are copium.

4 minutes ago, WooSai said:

it can* run from USB

As already explained many times in this thread, it doesn't run from USB. The OS runs in RAM.

Think of it as firmware. The OS doesn't use any of your storage.

1 hour ago, trurl said:

As already explained many times in this thread, it doesn't run from USB. The OS runs in RAM.

Think of it as firmware. The OS doesn't use any of your storage

It loads into RAM. That's where OSes go. All of them. Either you don't understand that, or you're being obtuse. It's bootstrapped from USB. And that's not a good solution, even if it would boot from a modern sized stick (which it doesn't).

This may be acceptable in your world, but I'm an adult, and I can afford adult equipment.

I just spent $15 at microcenter to get the smallest USB drive that I could find of reasonable quality, and it's not compatible.

...Can't install on a drive larger than 32GB... Give me a break. My $8k server's OS is running on a nickel's worth of silicon...

Not a great first impression, from either the software, nor the moderating staff.

Hello everyone; this is my first post, as a new user, and I hope my experience can be of help to someone.

I'll start by saying that the conclusion I reached was a discovery made by chance, not something I intended.

What am I talking about?

I'm talking about installing the entire unRAID system on disk (HDD, SSD, or other), including the license.

In my next post, I'll explain what I did...

P.S. Sorry for my poor English... I'm using a translator.

Edited December 14, 2025Dec 14 by PlutoAQ

So, the procedure I followed, without even knowing what I was doing, was as follows:

I confess that I wasn't trying to boot from disk instead of USB, and that this was a discovery I made by accident.

When I first tried to install unRAID 7.2.0 using the "unraid-usb-creator-1.1.0" software on a USB stick I had, it said it couldn't be installed because it couldn't find the device's GUID (I've attached a photo). So, since I had an old 500GB SATA HDD mounted in a SATA-USB adapter, I connected it to the PC's USB port, and the "unraid-usb-creator-1.1.0" software saw it as a USB stick with a GUID (which is what I used to get the free trial license).

The HDD had an NTFS partition, but when the "unraid-usb-creator-1.1.0" software transferred the unRAID system to it, it erased everything and created a single 500 GB FAT32 partition.

At this point, I connected my SATA HDD, using the SATA-USB adapter, to the USB port of the PC I wanted to turn into a NAS, and it booted immediately without any problems, with a valid license.

Then I wanted to do more research by reading the unRAID forum (and elsewhere online), and all the information I found only mentioned "installation only on USB and not on the HDD".

I realized that perhaps I had done the wrong procedure or that something wasn't working as it should; so I started doing more research and testing.

In fact, I first tried connecting my HDD with the unRAID system directly to a SATA port on the PC (it didn't work because the GUID was completely different and had strange characters).

Then I also tried putting my HDD with the unRAID system into another SATA-to-USB adapter I have, and even then the GUID changed and the unRAID system didn't work.

So I concluded that the GUID read is that of the adapter, not the disk.

In any case, the unRAID boot device must always be connected to a USB port and not to an internal SATA port on the PC.

It's basically the same procedure (or problem for some) as USB adapters for SD cards.

At this point, I assume the entire procedure could also work if the disk were an external SSD USB, or an M2 (NGFF or NVME) with a USB adapter. This will give anyone worried about their USB stick deteriorating or breaking over time greater peace of mind. And since an SSD or M2 drive doesn't suffer from the heat issues of USB flash drives, they could easily be used with USB 3 interfaces, also benefiting from faster boot speeds for the entire unRAID system.

I personally have a 128GB M2 NGFF drive left over, and as soon as I get a USB adapter, I'll try that too.

In any case, the license would be tied to the adapter's GUID, but be careful...

- If the adapter breaks and you replace it, you'll have to perform the license transfer procedure on the new device (adapter), and the old device will be blacklisted and can no longer be used with UnRAID. This action is permanent and cannot be undone (as required by the unRAID licensing system).

- If you use one of those external SSDs that are integrated with the SATA-USB adapter circuitry; Since you can't just replace the disk and must replace the entire device (SSD with adapter), you'll also need to perform the license transfer procedure on the new device.

- If the disk (SSD or M2) breaks, gets damaged, or needs to be replaced, you can do so by keeping the same license (which is tied to the adapter) and copying all the files from the unRAID system (which I recommend making a good backup of).

Now, there are some considerations regarding USB adapters...

USB adapters (for HDD, SSD or M2) of the same make and model may have the same GUID; therefore, they may be rejected by the unRAID licensing system if they have already been used by someone to register the license.

That's all!!!

P.S. Sorry for my poor English... I'm using a translator.

Edited December 14, 2025Dec 14 by PlutoAQ