What is a fast USB drive?  The Cruzer micro I have right now is slow as molasses and it takes unraid forever to boot.  It averages 10MB/s transfer rates vs. 30MB/s on my super talent.

Hi yelnatsch517.  I moved your post as I wanted to keep the Good Deals post as free of discussion.

 

I personally like the Verbatim Clip-It flash drives.  I don't know the speed exactly, but they boot quite fast and are relatively cheap.

What is a fast USB drive?  The Cruzer micro I have right now is slow as molasses and it takes unraid forever to boot.  It averages 10MB/s transfer rates vs. 30MB/s on my super talent.

 

There is only 50MB of data on my boot Flash drive.  If your read speeds are 10MB/s, it will only take about five seconds to read everything off of it!

 

Having said that, my test bed for unRAID is a very old Biostar Motherboard.  When it boots, the USB ports are only supported at USB ver 1 which has a maximum read speed of about 1.5Mb/s.  It takes well over five minutes to boot up.  The same same Flash drive boots in well under 30 seconds on any other computer that I plug it into.  But they all support USB ver2 (Max speed of 480 Mb/s) during the boot process...

There is only 50MB of data on my boot Flash drive.  If your read speeds are 10MB/s, it will only take about five seconds to read everything off of it!

 

Data transfer speeds are measured in Megabits per second (Mb/s), not Megabytes per second (MB/s).  A Megabit is one eighth of a Megabyte.  So to transfer 50MB of data at a rate of 10Mb/s would take 40 seconds.  You can read more about it here.

I'm considering the Patriot Xporter XT Rage 8GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive Model PEF8GRUSB, Supposedly they do 25-30MB/s, close to the max for USB 2.0

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220504

 

I also read on the amazon reviews that the smaller drives operate faster.

 

Frankly if you just want to boot unRAID at the highest speed, you can look at grub4dos.

grub4dos can read a reiserfs disk (cache maybe) and boot the bzroot/bzimage from that disk at high speed.

 

So if you put everything on your cache drive in /.boot you can safely tuck it away and boot at high speed.

I have not done this yet.

I'm planning to have a SSD as an APPS/LOCAL/HOME drive, then put grub4dos on it with  the bzroot/bzimage.

 

One of the cool things about grub4dos is you can have it search ALL your drives for the menu.lst file then boot the config from that.

The caveat is, it can be a pain to get installed on the MBR. I had to jump through hoops to install it on my flash drive.

There is only 50MB of data on my boot Flash drive.  If your read speeds are 10MB/s, it will only take about five seconds to read everything off of it!

 

Data transfer speeds are measured in Megabits per second (Mb/s), not Megabytes per second (MB/s).  A Megabit is one eighth of a Megabyte.  So to transfer 50MB of data at a rate of 10Mb/s would take 40 seconds.  You can read more about it here.

 

I was actually quoting what the original poster said was his read speed.  I am aware the MB means MEGABYTES and Mb means MEGABITS.  Unfortunately, many people are either not aware of the distinction or are simply careless when writing a post.  The point, I was trying to make was that read speed of the memory stick is only one of the factors of the boot time and if your boot time is EXTREMELY long, you might barking up the wrong tree thinking that a faster stick will fix the problem. 

 

As far as I am concerned, the boot time should not be a major consideration on a server in any case.  My working server has been up for 32 days and I intend to leave it up until I go on vacation in March.  Now on my test bed that I am testing unRAID on, the slow (very slow) boot time is a bit more of an issue as I am often testing out equipment and features and waiting for it to reboot is a bit trying at times. 

 

When I get ready to purchase my unRAID license, I am much more interested in a memory stick that is both reliable and long-lived.  I don't want it to fail and have to go through the process of getting a new license key.

Well said Frank, and I completely agree.  Booting in 30 seconds versus 5 minutes isn't that much of an issue when you only reboot semi-annually.

Well said Frank, and I completely agree.  Booting in 30 seconds versus 5 minutes isn't that much of an issue when you only reboot semi-annually.

 

It is when you have problems though.

I got so fed up I put bzimage/bzroot on my pxeboot server. now it boots(loads unraid) up 3 seconds.

The kernel and everything has to initialize, but the point is, the initial read of the kernel and root is lightning.

Wondering the same thing. I have a Dell PowerEdge SC1430 that loads bzimage/bzroot in about 18 seconds.

 

However, the unraid box I'm currently building takes about 3 minutes to load bzimage/bzroot.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=18872.0

 

What's the deal? Is this CPU related? Just curious, really.

Well said Frank, and I completely agree.  Booting in 30 seconds versus 5 minutes isn't that much of an issue when you only reboot semi-annually.

 

... unless you have an average of more than one power outage a day, like here in Philippines!

 

On a more relevant note, I am using an old Kingston Flash drive which, I am sure, is far from being high performance.  On my old test-bed server, it took several minutes to boot up.  When I upgraded to my present hardware, time to boot was reduced to one tenth.  So, it is not necessarily a problem with the memory stick but, possibly, a restriction of your usb interface.

Wondering the same thing. I have a Dell PowerEdge SC1430 that loads bzimage/bzroot in about 18 seconds.

 

However, the unraid box I'm currently building takes about 3 minutes to load bzimage/bzroot.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=18872.0

 

What's the deal? Is this CPU related? Just curious, really.

 

Every time you reboot unRAID, you are essentially re-installing the OS and all your add-ons.  unRAID runs from a RAMdisk (not from the flash drive or HDDs).  This means that upon boot, your server needs to copy all of the relevant data from the flash drive into the RAMdisk.  So the read speed of the flash drive and the speed of the USB port are the two biggest factors.  The speed of the RAM isn't really a factor because RAM is so much faster than even the fastest USB flash drive.  I doubt the CPU is much of a factor either.

I'm considering the Patriot Xporter XT Rage 8GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive Model PEF8GRUSB, Supposedly they do 25-30MB/s, close to the max for USB 2.0

 

I've got an Xporter. I'm happy with the speed. It replaced a OCZ which I found slow. Odd since advertised specs were the same.

I purchased the Patriot Xporter XT Rage. It's fast. At least 25-27MB/s in reads. Just what I needed !

 

Wondering the same thing. I have a Dell PowerEdge SC1430 that loads bzimage/bzroot in about 18 seconds.

 

However, the unraid box I'm currently building takes about 3 minutes to load bzimage/bzroot.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=18872.0

 

What's the deal? Is this CPU related? Just curious, really.

 

Every time you reboot unRAID, you are essentially re-installing the OS and all your add-ons.  unRAID runs from a RAMdisk (not from the flash drive or HDDs).  This means that upon boot, your server needs to copy all of the relevant data from the flash drive into the RAMdisk.  So the read speed of the flash drive and the speed of the USB port are the two biggest factors.  The speed of the RAM isn't really a factor because RAM is so much faster than even the fastest USB flash drive.  I doubt the CPU is much of a factor either.

 

Interesting. The same exact flash drive gave me the results I posted above. Wonder if the USB port on my build is reverting from usb2.0 to something slower.