He can stick them drives somewhere. I will leave it at that. His "make an offer" starts at $19?

At $20 it's still a solid deal.

Did you find a better alternative at a lower price? Curious what else is out there.

I ordered 2 of these drives on 10/20. Already delivered today, 10/22. Pretty quick from California to Ohio. I had one prior USB boot drive failure. I was using an industrial Kingston microSD in a Sandisk microSD-USB adapter. I think the USB adapter failed. My current drive is a Sandisk 32GB Ultra Fit but these Innodisk drives sounds like they may be more reliable. I was thinking about switching to internal boot but this remains simpler.

Good point about the adapter. People recommend industrial microSD cards for Unraid boot but rarely mention that the USB adapter isn’t a passive pass-through.

There’s a card reader controller chip in there, and most of those adapters aren’t built to run 24/7, so the adapter can end up as the weak link however good the card is. Your suspicion sounds plausible.

Glad the drives got to you so fast.

The Innodisk is a different class of hardware from the Ultra Fit too, so this should be a solid upgrade on both counts.

Just FYI for those upgrading their USB flash drives I ran into 2 issues. Using a fresh boot backup directly from Unraid UI or Unraid Connect the USB creator kept naming the drive BOOT rather than UNRAID so it wouldn't boot. I didn't realize this for a bit and thought there was a problem but ultimately I manually changed the name to UNRAID. Second it seems since 7.3 Unraid wants to automatically tie license to the TPM if available even if booting from USB. When I booted with the new drive best I can tell it automatically switched to using TPM with no easy way to use USB again. I updated the license key on the USB and all good now. I guess this does make it easier to swap USB drives if ever needed as there is no license issue.

Thanks for reporting this. Anyone replacing a USB drive should watch for it.

The TPM preference is documented in Unraid’s TPM licensing FAQ. https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/troubleshooting/tpm-licensing-faq/

It says new and replacement keys use TPM where possible, even if you boot from USB.

So if you’re swapping a failed flash drive on a board with a TPM, check which license type you end up with. Going back to USB is possible through the replacement flow.