Install Open Media Vault on a USB stick (N54L)?

I can tell you that if you want to have your NAS running longer then some days i would not recommend it. OMV simply grills USB Sticks because of heavy writing that is done to the OS Disk.
Use a SSD instead, maybe with USB to Sata adapter.

Greetings
David

Are there any thoughts of building ready configured "Live-CD"s?

Or what about this script using ramlog:
http://forums.openmediavault.o…opic.php?f=12&t=358#p1253

Or even create a Ramdisk (dont know how this works ...) for all excessive writes?

Ramdisk would only make sense for a swapfile/partition as the Ramdisk would be a partition inside your ram and be lost after power out (shutdown/reboot).

I don't see a Live-CD here either.

Only the ramlog script does makes sense, because if i remember correctly it saves the logs to your Hard Disk every couple of X or on a iniatiated shutdown.

But I don't know about the plans that volker has for that, maybe a plugin for 0.5?

Greetings
David

you could make a live cd but it wouldn't it just be painfully slow due cd access

There are no plans to adapt OMV to run on a USB stick. It is not stable enough and there have been to many problems with people using flash. There are many posrts already on the forum where people had a usb stick fail.

Due to reliability i would always tend to a HDD or SSD (with backup).

I think many people have problems running OMV from a memory stick because they use cheap USB drives. I had a problem with that initially, but when I switched to a higher quality USB drive it ran without any problems. Now I've had OMV running 24/7 for 4 months from a 4GB memory stick. I might have been lucky, but it seems to be doable with an OK USB drive

I know there are some (and they are definitly not cheap) usb sticks that have a SSD Controller onboard, maybe they could suffice, but you would had to pay alot of money on this kind of usb stick.

Greetings
David

Please don't run OMV from any sort of flash media other than an SSD. As has been said OMV grills them and spits them out. There are many many posts here on failed flash media. Some have failed in hours others have lived for some time. I think you are in record area for life. Even a small external USB hard drive would work.

I don't know what kind of space the N54L has inside. But you might even be able to velcro an external drive inside.

Please though back up the thumb stick because it is just a matter of time till it does fail.

The N54L holds 4 regular 3½ drives, and if you take out the cdrom it is possible to replace it with a holder for multiple drives, there are numerous guides on the net on how to do this.

My N54L holds 2 x 2tb sata drives and 2 x 250giga ssd drives mounted in a caddy so they fit in the hp easy swap adapter.

I believe ryecoaaron said it is possible to mount a 2.5 system drive below where the 5 1/4 slot is for for the DVD. One of my mini itx cases has a special holding area for a 2.5 inch drive below where a dvd would go. I think there is something like that on the n54l.

You could use something like this too with a slim dvd and a 2.5 drive, or 3.5, in the 5.25 inch optical drive slot.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/…aspx?Item=N82E16817994088

When you look at the pics at the Egg site of the above bracket - please realize it looks like the screwed on bracket is installed wrong.

If you were using a slim drive and a SSD you wouldn't need the smaller bracket. You could take it out. The slim drive on top and the SSD screws into 4 holes on the bottom of the bracket, using the underside holes on the SSD. On my mini-ITX case there is a recessed slot in the metal of the 5.25 bay just for a SSD. HP needs to do the same with their microservers and get SATA III. Can't believe the n54l was SATA II.

I had a N40L running on a 2GB (6c) Sandisk SD card using a USB SD card reader, in the internal USP port with 4 2TB HDD's and this ran for a 218 Days without a restart or a fail or a faulter this was sharing Movies, TV Series Games, Data, Pics, no problems and this was with 2.5 Version with updates.

SD or USB or the like is totally doable and plausible option.

Ta

We will not recommend usb sticks. This forum is full of posts where people's sticks failed. My SSD has been going strong 2 yrs. now. Many have important data on their OMV's so we will side with with what has been proven to be the more stable medium.

Zitat

SD or USB or the like is totally doable and plausible option.

Sounds like you got very lucky. As there have been many who have had their flash drives (thumbsticks, SD, CF) fail some in as little as a couple of hours.

As I believe Tekkbebe stated in another post, it is not so much OMV that is eating up flash media as it is Wheezy and the ext4 file system. The Raspberry Pi's OS is using ext4 and they are also showing the flash wear problem. The Pi community has come up with a way to boot the Pi from the SD but run the OS from a rotational drive. This also seems to affect most other system installs on non SSD flash media type of drives with the ext4 file system.

I did a search for ext4 and SSD and was surprised at how many returns there were! Most of them dealt with how to reduce the amount of writes ext4 does. It seems as though it has something to do with journaling of ext4. This flash wear problem may also affect other journaling file systems, not just ext4.

Most current stable file systems, ext4, xfs, zfs, and others were developed and created for use with rotational hard drives, before we started using flash media as main system drives.

There are some changes that can be made to the fstab file to reduce the writes ext4 makes. But, some of the changes also increase the likelihood of errors should there be a system crash from a power outage and so forth. These changes are meant for SSD's as the vast majority of SSD's have a wear leveling routine built into their firmware, which most thumbsticks, SD, CF cards do not.

The flash wear problem then is really not an OMV problem so much as it is an inherent design issue of the ext4 file system.

The flash wear problem has caused me to rethink how I use flash media. Now I basically only use flash media as large floppy disks. And have bought a couple of 500gig usb drives for storage rather than flash media.