Advice on Intel Optane M10 32GB as boot drive

TrueNAS General
,
21

Okay, I had to look up that word :slight_smile:

I have tried this using a RAID card over a decade ago with two mirrored drives and while it worked when I disconnected a drive to simulate failure, for me it comes back to what if the bootstrap code is corrupt and the system freezes or is stuck in a loop. That RAID card can’t help in that situation (that I know of) and I’m certain there is something out there to combat that called IT technical support (and you might be that support).

Since I was brought into this conversation, my two cents are:

  1. Maintain a current backup of your TrueNAS configuration file.
  2. If you are really worried about the time it takes to bring your system back online, you can create a bootable USB Flash drive with TrueNAS installed and then you restore your configuration to it. But it still requires some manual operation to get the system back online, it is not fully automatic.
  3. Never assume something will work as you think it will. Test it out to verify it works as intended.

Cheers

3 Likes
22

I bought the 16GB Intel Optane NVMe drive here in Brazil for around R$30.00 ($6.00 approximately). I will test it as soon as it arrives in the next few days. I temporarily installed Truenas Scale 25.04 on a 512GB ADATA NVMe drive and it’s working very well; the system starts up and goes online in 1 minute and 10 seconds.

This is the first time I’ve set up a storage system.

My system:

CPU Xeon 2680 v4, 14 cores, 28 threads, motherboard Socket x99, 8GB RAM ECC RDIMM 2133 Mhz, 2 x 8 TB SATA HDDs in Mirror / RAID 1 and 2 x 500 GB SATA HDDs in (Mirror / RAID 1). I’m testing the TRUENAS features for the first time and really liking it. I’m still deciding whether to add an M.2 drive as cache (NVMe, NGFF, or mSATA). I ​​bought some for testing. The RAM will soon be 16 GB.

23

For what Is worth… Mine Is still there with almost 10k hours of literally no-stop usage, without issue :smile: i have put It on a x1 lane so the speed Is likely what to expect for a SATA3 SSD (perfectly fine for boot IMHO).
I have decided to add a small alluminium heatsink on it to help cooling during scrubs, as the other NVME have.

100% no, you need at least 64gb of RAM to start thinking about L2arc, and don’t think you need slog at all.
If you have a chinese X99 motherboard, check if ECC Is really working (some of them have old chipset like H55 H61 H81 and operates in no-ecc mode)

1 Like