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Just wondering if anyone here has installed Freenas on an SSD. I know its meant to be on a USB pen drive. But Ive got a spare 64Gb SSD that I can install Freenas on and id like may be other stuff to run on it. I used dd to copy the image to the SSD but it just wouldnt boot. Gets a blank screen. Anyone with any ideas ?
Used,
xzcat FreeNAS-x64.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdb1 bs=64k (sdb1 being the ssd)
I had somewhat similar problems trying to boot from an SSD after restoring the disk image (in my instance, FreeNAS-9.2.0-RELEASE-x64.img.xz) directly to the SSD. Since my NAS box had no optical disk device, I first tried using Tiny Core Linux, booted via a USB stick, to restore the FreeNAS disk image to the SSD using the same method as the original poster. This resulted in the pre-boot loader being displayed ("F1 FreeBSD", etc) but it failed to locate the BTX loader. Next I tried booting from a FreeBSD 9.2 USB stick (FreeBSD-9.2-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img), entering "live" mode, and then doing the "dd" restore of the FreeNAS disk image to the SSD. This proceeded further, locating the BTX loader, however the end result was an endless stream of "#" characters being displayed on the console.
What ended up working for me was to "dd" restore the FreeNAS disk image to a USB stick, booting from said stick, entering a shell, and then copying the USB stick contents to the SSD, ie:
dd if=/dev/da1 of=/dev/ada0 bs=64k conv=sync
where "/dev/da1" was the USB stick and "/dev/ada0" was the SSD.
It has been some time since I used FreeNAS (I switched to OpenMediaVault as it was released), but I did run it from a HDD - FreeNAS won't care if it's a HDD or an SSD. You should be able to download an image installer and burn it to a CD.
I'm running a 5x3TB Seagate 7200 FreeNAS 9.2.5. I had an extra (6th) SATA port and an extra SSD - so I plopped it in and formatted a volume. Its works GREAT - e.g. formatted just fine and I use it as NFS to VMWare VMs. It IS noticeably faster than traditional RAIDZ1 7200RPM Seagates - even with sync=always on both volumes.
