Failover to USB for hard drive crash
-
Think I know the answer (no) but thought I would throw it out there. Any way to have an automatic failover to a USB thumb drive in the event of a hard drive crash? I have a customer who is using pfsense in a business where he has POS devices and really needs a good failover solution. Had a recent hard drive crash on a NUC Atom 280 build and he was offline for a few hours. He is running a captive portal for WiFi guests with authentication, but that could be optional for the USB boot. The owner has decent knowledge of PC's and could easily be walked through a boot from usb sequence.
What else would anyone recommend for failover in this situation? A complete system standing by? Is this where CARP comes in? -
ZFS with 2 or better 4 drives in a pool.
-
Everything fails eventually.
A good configuration backup taken regularly and a cold-spare system is a decent alternative.
GMIRROR should ride out most failures of a single hard disk.
ZFS should also help with a disk failure.
Two live units in HA/CARP will generally have zero downtime if a node crashes.
