Installing onto a USB stick for a home server advice?

[icedigger]

So I'm retiring my old server, a HP DL380 G4 with Windows Server 2012, at my home.

I bought a used dell poweredge R330 w/ xeon 1270 v5 and 16GB of ECC ram for dirt cheap since the casing was damaged on the back but does not impact the server at all.  It only has 4x 3.5 sas hotswap bays on the front.  No big deal.  Very quiet 1u server, a rarity.

I updated all bios and firmware for ALL hardware, including the power supplies firmware.

It does have one internal usb port though and instead of wasting the 4x 6TB SAS3 drives I have, why not throw the OS onto a 64GB USB stick I have laying around.

Any advice on installing the OS onto the USB stick?  Things I should do or not do?

[firenice03]

It does have one internal usb port though and instead of wasting the 4x 6TB SAS3 drives I have, why not throw the OS onto a 64GB USB stick I have laying around.

Any advice on installing the OS onto the USB stick?  Things I should do or not do?

[member=8524]icedigger[/member]
You could... You would want persistence, the manual has info for setting up in LL5.x ... But may still be slow...


But if it was me... and depending how you planning to set the 4 disks up... RAID etc etc etc ..
Might want to look/try LVM, allocate space to a Volume Group(s) with Logical Volumes - you can carve up and expand in the future as needed (depending how much space).
I have my LL4.8 laptop set up with LVM - at work we use this the majority. But I wanted to play with LVM's in "Ubuntu" more so LL it is.. It worked better to create the LVM ahead of time then install - if you go this route....

[TheDead]

Hi!

My two cents using USB keys... buy the fast ones.
Sandisk Ultra's or Extreme for example.
I changed all my keys to those a few years ago and never looked back.

PS: Was able to make a Windows 10 bootable USB key and was faster than the internal hard drive.
Edit:Typos, again...

[Moltke]

So I'm retiring my old server, a HP DL380 G4 with Windows Server 2012, at my home.

I bought a used dell poweredge R330 w/ xeon 1270 v5 and 16GB of ECC ram for dirt cheap since the casing was damaged on the back but does not impact the server at all.  It only has 4x 3.5 sas hotswap bays on the front.  No big deal.  Very quiet 1u server, a rarity.

I updated all bios and firmware for ALL hardware, including the power supplies firmware.

It does have one internal usb port though and instead of wasting the 4x 6TB SAS3 drives I have, why not throw the OS onto a 64GB USB stick I have laying around.

Any advice on installing the OS onto the USB stick?  Things I should do or not do?

It is possible. Just install it like you would in a HDD. You'll need to burn the .iso either to a USB or a DVD, boot the system from that device and install it onto your 64GB stick. I have a couple of distros installed that way and they work just fine. Persistence would be good but then you wont be able to update the kernel when/if you need/want to, at least not in an easy way.

[Şerban S.]

Hello!

Any advice on installing the OS onto the USB stick?  Things I should do or not do?

I installed some distros using USB sticks. Speed was way out of usability. A server is supposed to run on the fastest media available.

[...] My two cents using USB keys... but the fast ones.
Sandisk Ultra's or Extreme for example. [...]

While nobody can state that "beyond any reasonable doubt", this is my approach to this:

Use Gnome Disks to measure the speed of the drive.
Step 1
After the test completion, a diagram will be shown.
Make a screen capture of the diagram. Save it under a meaningful name.
Test all partitions of the drive, make a screen capture for each.
Step 2
Plug and test the USB candidate for server deployment. Make a screen capture for this, too.
Repeat the steps for each available USB stick.
Step 3
Use an image viewer to compare the test results for each drive.

Here is a sample of a SSD ADATA SU650, 240 GB (223 GB), main partition, /dev/sda3/:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=...0371782520

While getting this kind of results on a stick is unlikely, you can obviously test a classic HDD and after comparing the results, you can make the best decision regarding which stick fits the closest to the server's speed requirements.
Since you have 6 TB HDDs, a good idea is to test those and compare with the stick's speed.
The closer you get to the HDDs speed, the better.
I recommend you to avoid any stick that is under 40 MB/s (2400 MB/min). The higher, the better.
You need to bare in mind that heat is critical, and it slows down any NAND media, be it stick or SSD. The Joule effect has nothing to do with my opinions regarding a manufacturer or another. It's just a physics law. It simply acts with or without my consent or anyone else's.
Therefore, given the fact that the server is going to work many hours, the drive wil get hot at some point in time. This leads to bad sectors and in fact, it's what kills any storage of any kind, including optical media.

Good luck!