M.2 TOS Boot

[teddy]

I have 2 T12-423 units with 12 Raid5 disks in each one and the boot of the unit is very slow,
I imagine that because of the USB boot it is 1.1 technology
Since I have an M.2 slot available, my question is if it would be possible to boot the unit instead of doing it from the USB, it could be done from an installed M.2, which I imagine that with 128 GB in size it would be enough, since that the entire drive process would work very quickly (logically not the read-write of Raid 5).
And if this change could be made, it would not affect any type of data loss from Raid5.

[nale88]

In TOS5 and previous versions you cannot do this, however this change will be possible in the upcoming TOS6, which is currently in beta stage.

[crisisacting]

… because of the USB boot it is 1.1 technology
Since I have an M.2 slot available, my question is if it would be possible to boot the unit instead of doing it from the USB, it could be done from an installed M.2, which I imagine that with 128 GB in size it would be enough, since that the entire drive process would work very quickly (logically not the read-write of Raid 5).
And if this change could be made, it would not affect any type of data loss from Raid5.

The internal USB port is USB 2.0 & the initboot drive should also be 2.0 as well.

Regardless, the script on the USB checks for a boot partition on the drives, which is maybe maximum 3000 ms, so the slowness you are experiencing is not from the initboot, it's from one of your HDDs.

User-defined system drive is an upcoming feature of TOS 6, which will allow you to use one of the NVMe m.2 slots as that system drive, however although faster than SATA 3.× throughput, it's still limited to just 1 PCIe Generation 3 lane, so it's theoretical maximum throughput would just be under a gigabyte per second (~0.985 GBps).

The system partition just needs a minimum of 8 GB of space, so any PCIe Gen3 NVMe m.2 (preferably with DRAM cache) would suffice.

[teddy]

First of all, thank you for your responses.
So if TOS 6 allows you to boot from an M.2 drive, what would be the steps to take? Disconnect all 12 drives from RAID5, boot the drive and upgrade to TOS 6? .
I want to take advantage of having an M.2 available but without using it as a hypercache (Because twice I tried, the Raid 5 was corrupted and you even accessed my device and you couldn't recover the information so I lost a lot of data) .

When I say that the boot is very slow, I compare it with RAID 5 (DASD not NAS) from Orico that with 5 disks in Raid5 also of 22 TB each one starts immediately but with the T23-423 with the same ones but 12 disks it is difficult around 15 minutes.

So my next question would be... would it be faster if the boot was done from an M.2 or is it not worth the risk of updating to TOS6 and perhaps losing all my data?

[Gremlin]

I have no hard and fast information about this but, just thinking out loud, I would imagine that the 'disk selection' idea would only work at time of installation. Then the OS copies on ALL your hdd would need to be removed (8GB x 12 in Raid 1 per system). I presume that would also involve removal of the swap partitions (2GB x 12 in Raid 1 per system) and boot info on the drives. I'm guessing that, at the moment, even @TMSupport don't have much info as to how it will actually work until the developers release a viable installation version.