Best cheapest drive

Craig321

Craig321

Craig321

Soldato
Joined
2 May 2004
Posts
19,953
Hi,

I just got a Proliant micro server and unfortunately they no longer come with a 250GB hard drive.

Can anyone recommend a cheap as possible drive please? Size doesn't matter, but need reliability (so would prefer new).

It'll be just to install FreeNAS on to.

Thanks.
 
You can install FreeNAS onto a USB flash drive. There's even an internal port for it.

Anyway best and cheapest are mutually exclusive. ;)
 
MagicBoy said:
You can install FreeNAS onto a USB flash drive. There's even an internal port for it.

Anyway best and cheapest are mutually exclusive. ;)
Click to expand...

I was thinking of doing that and noticed the USB on motherboard last night, but how reliable is a pen drive going to be running 24/7? I've never really seen them as something to trust.

I suppose I could take full backups of FreeNAS every few days in case it did die.

Also I guess that means I could have 5 data drives if I just use the internal USB slot :D

Edit:
Also, just read this on their site:
The FreeNAS® operating system is a running image. This means that it should not be installed onto a hard drive, but rather to a USB or compact flash device that is at least 2 GB in size.
Click to expand...

Thanks MagicBoy, didn't really consider it until you said. :)
 
Last edited:
My el-cheapo one I picked up at a conference died after 12 months, the replacement Kingston has been fine. Keep a backup of the config file and you will not lose any data. Reinstall FreeNAS to the new flash drive and restore the config.
 
I don't think the config changes very often unless you're tinkering around. I set FreeNAS up, backed up the config and have not fiddled with it since. Stashed the config backup on Dropbox and months later it worked fine.
 
True, it'll change a lot in the first few days but once I'm happy I don't think I'll touch it much and if I do I can just back it up then I suppose.

So do I literally need to backup that one config file/folder and if something goes wrong I can install FreeNAS onto a new pen drive and restore the file(s)?
 
Craig321 said:
True, it'll change a lot in the first few days but once I'm happy I don't think I'll touch it much and if I do I can just back it up then I suppose.

So do I literally need to backup that one config file/folder and if something goes wrong I can install FreeNAS onto a new pen drive and restore the file(s)?
Click to expand...

Yep. Worked for me.

USB flash drive failure won't affect your data on other drives, other than the unlikely possibility of minor file corruption when it stops responding.
 
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