After testing the software for 30 days, I ended up buying 2 Licenses. But thing what i find strange when doing the setup. You have to use USB Stick drive? What reason and why for a USB stick? It has to be one of worse for storage as there fail in sort space of time. Hence why I am posting this question.  At the moment my 2 servers are offline due to 3 fail USB sticks both of these was "SanDisk Cruzer Blade 32GB"

 

Thanks

Michael.

There is no option to ‘install’ Unraid in the conventional sense.

The OS does not run from the USB stick - it runs from RAM.    It is just loaded during booting from the archives on the USB stick so does not really stress it in any way.

No idea why you have that failure rate, many people go for years without issue.   It is advantageous if possible to plug into a USB 2 socket as they tend to be more reliable and run cooler.  Even if they do not have external USB 2 sockets most motherboards have internal USB 2 headers that can be used. 

As @itimpi said, unraid runs from RAM, so usage of usb drive is minimal. Unless, if you are mirroring logs to usb or explicitly have something writing into /boot, so be aware of these unusual wear scenarios

 

As for why, unraid uses the boot drives hardware UUID to pair your licence to, and that is something provided by most USB drives

Flash drives are prone to failure. As an avid photographer most serious and pro photographers will mention it is not wise to store precious photos to flash drives, SDs, compact flash or other forms of flash media as they are not reliable.

 

The constant reply that "it runs from RAM" is an insane response. Could not Unraid still run from ram if it was installed a SSD, NVMe or mechanical hard drive.

 

Also the point that you are giving up a SATA port makes no sense, as most people have also installed additional SATA cards or HBAs.

 

Limewire should give their customers the option to install to hard drive. Or are they really that mistrustful of their customers?

 

Flash drives are a pain in the butt.

@Vetteman, well you could always use a SATA to USB adapter and run it like that. I think that should work. Because then it's not a SATA connection.
Of course try this at your own risk🤷‍♂️

My unraid install on a SanDisk usb failed again.  Unraid does run from ram, but when the USB fails, I can no longer interact with my server.  It must interact with config files or something else stored on the USB since my file shares and VMs fail when the USB fails.

Edited March 16, 20251 yr by Mr.Papageorgeo