Installing DSS V6 on ReadyBoost-capable USB Flash Drive

I have an HP DL180 G6 with a p410 RAID controller and 4x 3TB drives. About the only thing the controller will allow my to do is create a single 9TB logical drive in RAID 5. There's no way to partition it any lower than this so I can't create the 2GB system drive needed to install DSS - installing on the RAID gives me a 9TB system drive and nothing for data :-)

Right now I have DSS running from a USB flash drive so I can get at the RAID, but I'm aware of the dire warning in the Quick Start guide about flash drives being unreliable. This suggested I should get either an external USB hard drive or some sort of internal hard drive for the DL180. Both of these seem like expensive options.

I've been doing a bit of reading around ReadyBoost-capable flash drives, and it seems that Microsoft reckon these should last for 10 years. Is that true? If so, should I be okay installing DSS on one of those to save me the expense and waste of getting a physical drive for the 2GB that it needs? Has anyone tried this?

I've found a 2GB HP branded ReadyBoost drive on Amazon for £4.95 that I'm keen to try!

Thanks for any advice.
Kevin

We ran into a similar problem with our hardware, so we install open-e on a 'plain old' flash drive...

I have the same server HP DL180 G6, and you can create the 2GB lun for DSS to boot from.
I assume you are creating your raid configuration through the bios of the raid controller.
This is where you are going wrong, this bios for HP raid controllers is very simple and does not offer all the features. You need to run HP Array Configuration Utility (ACU)
ACU can create a 2gb logical drive for DSS, and then you can use the remaining space for a data disk.

If you google "smartstart-8.70B-0-x64.zip" You should find the HP SmartStart CD which contains the ACU utility to create the proper raid configuration.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport...4ef394e57dd739
If you don't like booting from cdrom or simply don't have one you can use the HP USB Utility "hpusbkey.zip"
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport...reg_R1002_USEN

Creating the DSS boot lun on your hardware raid controller is the prefered method over booting from USB.

You can find our Quick Start manual at :
http://www.open-e.com/service-and-su.../quick-starts/

Thanks for the advice. I've downloaded the ACU so I'll go repartition the RAID and reinstall DSS next time I'm at the data centre.

@kbro:
what about installing on a e.g. 4GB SATA DOM? So you dont have to care about reliability of USB devices or USB controllers.
Just use one SATA slot onboard which should be available cause you're using a H/W raid controller anyway. (you just have to care about power connection, cause a SATA DOM usually needs one)

So the SATA DOM will be handled like an internal hard disk and 4GB are not too expensive and enough for dssv6 and any further updates.

Which SATA DOM would you recommend?
Does anyone can recommend a 4 GB module, that will last "some years"?

When I asked Open-E support for a recommendation, they told me this:
"We recommend to install it on the storage, because we notice that the DOMs and
USB flash memories has a small life period compared to the storage disks."

prahn

How about a 40 gb SSD drive connected directly to the SATA port on the mother board. Cheap and dependable. I thought there was very little that gets written to the DSS volume after it boots up so it should not matter. I have had test systems booting off of 2g thumb drives for forever and no problems.

In regards to your SATDOM sugestion. That is actually what I wanted to do.
With my test hardware I was using a whitebox and has power cables available to power the Innodisk SATADOM.

When production systems arrived and I've noticed this with all the major server vendors is there isn't any spare power leads lying around to power the SATADOM.
The Innodisk SATADOM uses a molex splitter to go to it's 5v 2pin connector. There simply isn't anywhere to plug the power connector in most of the time.
Not without making some custom cable to power to take the power source from somewhere else.

I have used Innodisk SATADOM's in the past and found them to perform well and be very reliable.

I just ordered a Half-Slim SATA SSD from Transcend with 4 GB:
http://www.transcend-info.com/indust...erNo=9&ModNo=6

This one has wear-leveling, and hopefully it does work reliable for a long time.