Good day Crew,

 

Do you folks run any kind of diagnostics / health checks on flash drives?

When do you know it is time to replace the OS drive?

 

My main server is still chugging along on the original Lexar Jumpdrive FireFly  2 GB Flash drive.

 

It has been in use since, I believe, the v4 days... which makes it... 10+ years old?

 

It is not displaying any problems that I am aware of... It runs SO cool compared to my 2nd rigs' SanDisk Cruzer Fit... and I'd hate to replace a perfectly good drive for no reason other than age.

 

Keep good backups,( @Squid has an app for that) and when it dies, replace it. Now that the key replacement server is online, the hassle factor to get back running with a new key is VERY low. I'd guess you should be back running within an hour if it happens. Automatic key replacements are time limited, you can't do them back to back with the same license, so proactively moving the license off of a running key doesn't make much sense. If you do happen to have multiple key failures in a short period, you can email limetech and plead your case, but the hassle factor is much higher. Automatic replacement is 1 per year.

Take this with a grain of salt, as I don't have any first hand knowledge on the subject.

But my understanding is that flash memory itself doesn't degrade over time, only based on writes and unraid very rarely writes to the usb drive so the flash should last quite a while, barring physical/electrical damage to the drive or filesystem corruption caused by power outages and such.

As jonathanm says, now that we have automatic key replacements as long as you have your config backed up there's no real harm in using the drive until it dies.

Thanks Crew for the sanity check!

 

I enabled the scheduled backups of the Tower FLASH via Squid's CA Appdata Backup / Restore app last night. 

The new share this app writes into will be scripted to copy into my Tower2's backup share shortly

 

Power outage?  Each server is on it's own APC Smart-UPS 1000... and both UPS is plugged into a Power Conditioner

Edited April 17, 20179 yr by landS

3 minutes ago, landS said:

The new share this app writes into will be scripted to copy into my Tower2's backup share shortly

That makes it even easier to get back running. With this system in place, I think you could be back live within 10-15 minutes of sourcing a replacement USB.

The problem with backing your Flash Drive to the array (as I see it), is that if the Flash fails you may not longer have access to the array.  I back up my Flash drives to another computer.  It is simple to do this: 

 

First, stop the array.  (This writes the file out with the flag set that indicates the array has been stopped to the Flash drive.  Thus, preventing unRAID from thinking that is was a dirty shutdown when you restore the contents to the new Flash Drive.)

Second, copy the entire contents of the Flash Drive to a folder on another computer.

Third, Restart the array. 

 

Takes about two minutes...

51 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

The problem with backing your Flash Drive to the array (as I see it), is that if the Flash fails you may not longer have access to the array.

True, but if you are planning on keeping the server running unraid, you are going to have to prepare another flash anyway, and once you are up with the trial key, you can mount your array drives and retrieve your backup. Overwrite, reboot, transfer license, done.

2 hours ago, jonathanm said:

True, but if you are planning on keeping the server running unraid, you are going to have to prepare another flash anyway, and once you are up with the trial key, you can mount your array drives and retrieve your backup. Overwrite, reboot, transfer license, done.

 

With my method, you copy the Files to the new Flash Drive, rename the Drive to 'UNRAID', run make-bootable, stick it in the server and boot.  Then you can upgrade the license.  No remembering which are the cache, parity and data drives.  

2 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

 

With my method, you copy the Files to the new Flash Drive, rename the Drive to 'UNRAID', run make-bootable, stick it in the server and boot.  Then you can upgrade the license.  No remembering which are the cache, parity and data drives.  

Problem with that is that if you don't create a new backup everytime the drive configuration changes, then you can potentially wind up in a situation where when starting the array writes will trash what unRaid *thinks* is your parity drive (but may in fact not be if you changed the parity drive with another and didn't re-backup)  Because of this case, CA's backup doesn't save the super.dat file, but instead creates a text file with the current drive assignments (and since most people will run the backup weekly or so, it'll pretty much always be up to date)...

 

(And nothing says that you have to have the backup destination in CA to be on the array (I don't) )

11 minutes ago, Squid said:

Problem with that is that if you don't create a new backup everytime the drive configuration changes, then you can potentially wind up in a situation where when starting the array writes will trash what unRaid *thinks* is your parity drive (but may in fact not be if you changed the parity drive with another and didn't re-backup)  Because of this case, CA's backup doesn't save the super.dat file, but instead creates a text file with the current drive assignments (and since most people will run the backup weekly or so, it'll pretty much always be up to date)...

 

That drive configuration problem problem does exist but in a lot of cases the drive configuration is very seldom changes.  (Mine has been stable for on my Media server for more than eighteen months.)  I still think it is best to store the Flash Drive copy off of the server so that rebuilt can be quickly done.  The Testbed server has changed a few times as I moved back-and-forth between single and dual parity. 

 

Note to original OP.  I, personally, think that a ten year old Flash Drive should be replaced on general principals.  Those things were never intended to have a long life and I don't think LimeTech would have any issues to you deciding to simply retire it before it does fail.  (In making it so easy to replace a key file, they must have anticipated that folks were occasionally going to do exactly that!)  Just choose a quality brand-name product and not a free handout at a local flea market. 

Thanks for all the advice crew