[OpenIndiana-discuss] rpool on mirrored USB flash drives

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On 7 August 2012 00:21, Sašo Kiselkov <skiselkov.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm considering rebuilding my home server (an HP MicroServer) for some
> higher capacity and dumping the single 250GB rpool disk and instead
> replace it with a pair of USB flash sticks (no need to preserve data,
> I'll copy stuff around and help the system along with booting). The
> question is, is this a good way to go about it?
> Are there any gotchas with using USB attached storage as boot media in
> OI? Any experience with that? (For all I know, it's smooth and working.)

I have tried several different USB sticks inside my HP Microserver as
the rpool for OI installs.  While the system supports doing it the
experience was universally poor; ranging from pathologically slow
boots right down to periodic checksum errors on some sticks under
heavy I/O load to rpool filesystems.

I ended up installing a 60GB SSD in the optical drive bay and
attaching it to the fifth internal SATA port (the "OD" port), having
applied a BIOS hack to turn it into an AHCI port.  This worked very
well.

I would only recommend USB sticks for booting a SmartOS-like
distribution where you do hardly any writing to the boot device (ever)
and only read around 250MB from it into RAM *once* per boot.

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
UNIX Admin/Developer
http://blog.sysmgr.org