My server currently boots from a crucial SSD. The server is rebooting, and this may be a potential problem, so I’m looking at moving the boot / boot pool to an more resiliant solution, and am looking for a bit of advice.
I’ve read a few articles and the problem with mirrors and redundancy seems to be with the boot/ os picking the right device. I did think of using a mini / cheap raid 1 board supporting just 2 sdd/Nvme, so I can “break the rules” and use a hardware raid solution so the os sees 1 device, but I’m not sure how freenas would handle this. It should be transparent to freenas.
What would you suggest? Would I be best just putting in a NVMe PCIE board with 1 NVME on it to boot from?
Save your configuration, pick and install another boot device, install TrueNAS anew, load the configuration and call it a day.
If you do want a resilient boot system, you’ll find a resource on the old forum for a strategy involving three drives and a ZFS mirror between a single drive and hardware RAID1. Overkill for most home settings.
Why do you think that? The only reason I would even consider this is if the Wear Level is down to zero (0), meaning the device is unable to write to the drive.
With that said, you did not specify if the server ever completely booted into TrueNAS, which from my perspective is a critical piece of information.
If TrueNAS becomes fully operational (booted up fine) and the system runs for a few minutes, and then reboots, I highly doubt the boot drive is the source of the problem.
If TrueNAS never completely boots up, then I’d reinstall TrueNAS on that SSD and do not restore your configuration yet. Let it sit, does it reboot?
If not, then restore the configuration, does it reboot?
If yes, then you probably have a jail/VM or some strange configuration issue going on. Time to disable things and figure it out.
If you still suspect the SSD, post the SMART data for the drive smartctl -x /dev/??? so we can take a look at it, or better yet, in my links below is a link to Drive Troubleshooting Flowcharts, use that.
As for boot redundancy, I think you have that advice already, but I rarely promote using dual boot drives unless you have a true RAID card specifically to support ONLY the boot drives. I promote maintaining a copy of your TrueNAS configuration data and if you need to restore it, you have it.
Hopefully this will help you figure out why your system is rebooting.
