7 hours ago, Soundhacker said:

Still, it’s quite difficult to find your way around with the massive amount of hardware available.

Samsung's consumer USB drives are actually one of the more commonly recommended but not particularly suitable options for always-on Unraid boot duty -- so the failures you experienced aren't random bad luck or the nature of USB flash generally.

The Bar Plus and FIT Plus contain modern NAND that requires continuous idle controller maintenance regardless of how they're mounted or how rarely you reboot.

The UPS protects against corruption from power loss but doesn't address the underlying NAND stability issue.

The drives that run for decades in Unraid are overwhelmingly older large-node MLC hardware from the 2007-2012 era -- fundamentally more stable NAND that requires essentially zero idle controller activity.

The USB Flash section guide in this forum covers exactly why and what to look for.

Glad internal boot is working well for you.

Worth checking what NAND is in your internal drive -- if it's a modern consumer NVMe the same physics apply in a different form factor.

The guide covers that too.

Edited April 12Apr 12 by Lolight

The QuickSync issues I had with older versions (transcoding with emby) seem to be fixed.

Just wanted to report that after a freeze on beta1 the second beta has been so stable, that I switched my prod server over to it.

The migration to internal boot worked flawlessly, the server boots much faster now. I can only recommend using intel octane drives, if you have one or two laying around.

Migrating the key to TPM from the flash drive also worked as expected.

Couldn't be happier with the implementation. Huge thanks to the dev crew!

When trying to upgrade 7.2.4 -> 7.3-b2 on a server with just 4G of Ram, the initial plugin installation fails. Maybe some kind of check to see if Ram, and thus /tmp, is to small?

plugin: installing: unRAIDServer.plg

Executing hook script: pre_plugin_checks

plugin: downloading: unRAIDServer.plg ... done

plugin: downloading: unRAIDServer-7.3.0-beta.2-x86_64.zip ... 96%

plugin: unRAIDServer-7.3.0-beta.2-x86_64.zip download failure: File I/O error

Executing hook script: post_plugin_checks

How much free space is there on your flash drive?

20 hours ago, rix said:

Just wanted to report that after a freeze on beta1 the second beta has been so stable, that I switched my prod server over to it.

The migration to internal boot worked flawlessly, the server boots much faster now. I can only recommend using intel octane drives, if you have one or two laying around.

Migrating the key to TPM from the flash drive also worked as expected.

Couldn't be happier with the implementation. Huge thanks to the dev crew!

I was looking into this but I saw that my intel 265k with ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. Z890 AYW GAMING WIFI W Version Rev 1 is not supported. Sucks because I was looking into doing it with optane drives.

7 hours ago, Tucubanito07 said:

I was looking into this but I saw that my intel 265k with ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. Z890 AYW GAMING WIFI W Version Rev 1 is not supported. Sucks because I was looking into doing it with optane drives.

wdym unsupported? I just used a generic pcie adapter for the optane drive. It’s just a very small very low latency ssd.

2 hours ago, rix said:

wdym unsupported? I just used a generic pcie adapter for the optane drive. It’s just a very small very low latency ssd.

According to intel it is not supported anymore. Just a quick search.

11 minutes ago, Tucubanito07 said:

According to intel it is not supported anymore. Just a quick search.

You didn't read the 2nd paragraph of that it seems.

What's not supported is the original purpose for those of being used a transparent cache for HDDs, but they still work like any other SSD for general storage.

59 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

You didn't read the 2nd paragraph of that it seems.

What's not supported is the original purpose for those of being used a transparent cache for HDDs, but they still work like any other SSD for general storage.

Did you read the conclusion?

NOT recommended... even as "normal" SSD...

1 minute ago, Zonediver said:

NOT recommended... even as "normal" SSD...

These seem to be a popular, effective, and inexpensive option nonetheless. Also, I would not rely too heavily on AI slop. Seen plenty of threads around here that start with "AI told me to do this and now it's really broken. Please help."

That ai-answer mentioned RST. Not relevant for Unraid (Intel Rapid Storage technology is Windows only and you don't need to activate it?)

Inconsistent behavior? As in what?

The conclusion reads more like faster options exists and Optane is "obsolete".

Optane is cheap, absolutely fast enough, and reliable for this kind of use.

Edited April 14Apr 14 by Niklas

2 hours ago, Zonediver said:

Did you read the conclusion?

NOT recommended... even as "normal" SSD...

it would be talking from a raw speed perspective, and as an acceleration device.

2 reasons this doesn't matter, optane is lower latency so is better for real world use, and the raw speed of slower gen3 pcie is still multiples faster than what Unraid users are coming from with USB drives

7 hours ago, Zonediver said:

Did you read the conclusion?

NOT recommended... even as "normal" SSD...

It's AI BS that is spouted out with no understanding of the context. Plenty of us using them just fine.

It's obsolete and not recommended "because it's commercially abandoned and we have PCIe5 storage now". You don't need a PCIe5 SSD to boot Unraid from. The almost unlimited endurance is a good thing though, which it doesn't know about.

Edited April 14Apr 14 by Kilrah

I don't believe everything AI says just a 5 minutes search that I posted. I read on her forums that it was not being supported but I can see that the support part is for Intel Rapid Storage which wouldn't be used with Unraid. I didn't know if we could use it for that so that's why I didn't pull the trigger on one of them. Pretty cheap for what I need it for. Thank you all for the feedback, really appreciated it.

A 16gb Intel optane should be enough just for booting right? I pulled a trigger for a new intel optane drive 16gb.

That's plenty.

53 minutes ago, Veah said:

That's plenty.

Thanks. Once 7.3 comes out I will move my usb flash drive to the intel optane and see how that goes. I appreciate your help.

Appreciate everyone testing this version. Wish I had a test box to contribute! But I digress...

I'm writing because I'm curious how testing is going and if the devs have a target release date for 7.3.0?

I'm quite interested in this release.

I've been very happy with 7.3.0b2. The only "issue" is I have yet to migrate my license to TPM because the X11SCL-F motherboard needs a TPM module added. Once I get that I can say good bye to the USB stick.

On 4/18/2026 at 6:37 AM, WN1X said:

I've been very happy with 7.3.0b2. The only "issue" is I have yet to migrate my license to TPM because the X11SCL-F motherboard needs a TPM module added. Once I get that I can say good bye to the USB stick.

And my TPM module arrived today. Simply plugged it in and was able to move my license from USB to TPM; easy peasy!

With version 7.3, the command pcie_aspm=force no longer works for me.

Could someone add to the FAQ on the pool boot a list of the benefits of moving to this method. A do understand that it provides the "new and shiny" trinket experience to some of us; but what else? It still seems to me as a solution (as explained by SI1) in search of a problem. I would just like to know what problem(s) the developers felt that this solutions would solve, since I am a newby to unraid and could have problems I don't even know about - I certainly so no problems with my booting experience.

1 hour ago, zulu153 said:

Could someone add to the FAQ on the pool boot a list of the benefits of moving to this method. A do understand that it provides the "new and shiny" trinket experience to some of us; but what else? It still seems to me as a solution (as explained by SI1) in search of a problem. I would just like to know what problem(s) the developers felt that this solutions would solve, since I am a newby to unraid and could have problems I don't even know about - I certainly so no problems with my booting experience.

Failing USB drives. Many of us have some that have been working fine for years, but not everyone is that lucky.

1 hour ago, zulu153 said:

Could someone add to the FAQ on the pool boot a list of the benefits of moving to this method. A do understand that it provides the "new and shiny" trinket experience to some of us; but what else? It still seems to me as a solution (as explained by SI1) in search of a problem. I would just like to know what problem(s) the developers felt that this solutions would solve, since I am a newby to unraid and could have problems I don't even know about - I certainly so no problems with my booting experience.

If you want more info about the problem, there is an entire thread devoted to it. You can start reading at this post and get a understanding of what has happened over the past few years with USB drive quality.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/119052-psa-on-sandisk-usbs/page/13/#findComment-1603874

There are a lot of us who are using older USB devices that have never had an issue but there are a lot of folks who have the more recent devices who are experiencing drives failures within a very few months of installation.