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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

> This USB header is only USB 2.0 though so it’s not an option for this purpose.

Why not? I would not expect the OS drive to be I/O heavy on a NAS.

I also use the NAS for some light server workloads and it was just annoyingly slow when running on a USB 2.0 thumb drive. System updates took forever too.

Edit: I want to add though that the main reason behind this is "for fun" :D

> I also use the NAS for some light server workloads and it was just annoyingly slow when running on a USB 2.0 thumb drive. System updates took forever too.

Ah, fair enough - I suppose NAS/server is a bit of a continuum anyways.

> I want to add though that the main reason behind this is "for fun" :D

Yeah, that seemed more likely up front:D

You could still move e.g. /nix to the BTRFS disks and only keep /boot on the thumb drive, no? That’s more or less how I have NixOS set up with ZFS. But your solution is of course much fancier :D

Could you share more about your NixOS setup, or good resources? Genuinely curious as I’m looking into building a small, low-budget Plex server running NixOS :)

That would be too loud imo :p

I started using hd-idle to spin down the drives when idle for 30 minutes even.

I do however run my system with root on tmpfs and have various data persisted on the SSD.

Not in an absolute sense, but the speed limitations of USB 2.0 do become immediately apparent when you try to run an operating system off of it. Even a super lightweight Linux is usually going to load binaries from disk when executed, and logs are going to be written to disk, etc.

Also page faults are going to be slooooow.

> and logs are going to be written to disk [...] Also page faults are going to be slooooow.

OP did say they added a stick of RAM, so w/ ZRAM on there it might not be too bad.

Raspberry Pi forced an entire generation of software hacks to deal with slow os/boot disk speeds (esp. the earlier models but also just the affordability aspect even with the new models).

For small OS images you can sometimes get away with loading the whole thing into RAM on boot and then running from RAM, which essentially removes the boot drive from the equation completely except for that initial copy to RAM.

I always pick this option when I use Clonezilla because usually I'm booting it from a USB stick and everything would be slow the whole time if I didn't put it into RAM.

Ugh, not the speed itself (you can have up to 30MB/s, which is more than enough), but the ability to serve multiple requests simultaneously, ie Queue Depth. Most of the time you xan assume QD for them is 2 and you would't miss at all.

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