USB Boot Redundancy

[Tetricz]

Basically I want to be able to register two usb drives and have them mirrored in the same machine. I don't know if it's possible to do this or not, but I think it would be a nice to have.

Considering I've had 3 usb drives fail me over the years I just want something that doesn't have me nervous it'll stop responding randomly someday. So even something like support for Sata-DOMs would be really welcome. Although I think just having some sort of automatic mirroring would be good enough.

[Squid]

The MyServers plugin does a "mirror" of the flash drive (optional), but mirrors it to the cloud for easy recovery from any browser on any device

[EdEpiphBKNY]

That's a great solution but it doesn't give you a zero downtime scenario. A USB drive just failed on me during a reboot. I'm not sure what happened but it was a remote reboot as I was on our VPN. No one is in the building to do the swap of the USB drive which sucks. I'd love an option were there could be 2 usb drives mirrored in a pool like the cache drives as the boot/OS drive and be notified of a failed drive and have time to swap it out. 

 

Just my $0.02. 

[sunwind]

On TrueNAS you could mirror the boot drive and if one failed the other would boot and it would resilver the first, why can't unraid do that now?

[JonathanM]

16 hours ago, sunwind said:

why can't unraid do that

Because the boot drive for Unraid has to match the license file.

[sunwind]

On 6/23/2023 at 1:45 PM, JonathanM said:

Because the boot drive for Unraid has to match the license file.

 

could it not generate a hash based on the hardware device ID or something of 1 second USB stick only (basically however it identifies the mai none) that ties to your key, and will only work on that second usb stick, while in conjunction with the first? that way you won't get people sharing 1 key to 2 people etc.

Edited July 7, 2023 by sunwind

[worldspawn]

Having just had a USB drive be corrupted on reboot (safe shutdown, don't know what the issue was), the lack of capacity for a redundant boot is very frustrating.  For a system built on redundancy, depending on the integrity of a single flash media device seems like a pretty big oversight.  Particularly since it's quite a hassle to set up and register a new device.  It's easier to swap a failed hard drive or motherboard than it is to swap a thumb drive, and that's not right.