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I always burn in my disks for 100+ hours so that music sounds better when I stream the files from them. Sometimes I'll do it in the presence of certain crystals if I'm trying to emphasize certain frequency ranges for specific genres.

Yeah the more I browsed on Amazon I noticed I could get a Patriot Memory 128GB ssd for 13 bucks... So I'll probably just get a pair of those and mirror them. If one fails I'll replace it with something fancier. But I might try the USB drive anyways now just out of curiousity. I'll report back with findings, for SCIENCE!

I think this is the most important consideration, even over personal risk tolerance because, with enough redundancy you're good regardless.

In my 3rd test system (Qnap Ts-251+) i was forced to use usb drives as i was unable to use the embedded proprietary m.2 ssd for boot. So i got x2 Sandisk Ultra fit usb's, I then installed the OS in mirrored mode for redundancy. Speed wise, no major sluggishness other than the device itself being fairly old now. And as it's a 3rd test system i'm not concerned about failures ect. BUT like others have said, it's not ideal and if you are doing it, at least run 2 or more for redundancy. or better yet a usb > sata cable then use a 2.5" ssd.

I have done it in working environment and it lasted a week then we moved to a ssd. Mainly it was Really slow to respond, it was a good usb3 media in a usb3 port

The point of a HDD burn-in is exactly that, to catch manufacturer defects (usually bad physical sectors) before you write your data to it, especially if you choose to use refurbished drives. It's not witchcraft it's just an extra step one can take to try and be proactive to HDD health instead of reactive to bad HDD health.

I tested it once. I installed TrueNas on 3 USB drives (2 drive mirror), just for fun. It was very slooooowwwww and the first USB drive died after 2 weeks. If you like an experiment, go ahead. If you want a stable system, listen to @PsychoWards and @Mr_Stig and but the $13 ssd.

Hexos will write your USB Flash Drive to death very fast, that's why they are not recommended because of the constant writes which Truenas is doing to the drive (Logs, Graphs and the system dataset for the both drive). Also the performance might not be the best. It is definitely possible but you should definitely backup your system config regularly and don't wait multiple years before replacing the drive. 🙂

Talking about hifi components and burn-in, The tubes in my (tube 😉) amplifier need a burn-in, before they have reached their optimum performance. They even need a warm up after start, to reach working temperatures. In hifi circles there’s talk of a psychological burn-in also, so it would take some time for your brain to adapt to the sound. I don’t think that would apply to hard drives in any way, though.

Now we’re getting into hifi/audiophile territory 😉 In those circles burn-in is a serious thing, The ”truth” there is, it always takes time for electronic products, cables and speaker cones to sound their best, They need sometimes a couple hundred hours to settle in, from new. So, with hard drives as this topic by @Dylan deals with, is there a standardized method to do this burn-in? Hard drives are kind of mechanical devices, so could make sense. I guess all this isn’t just ”tongue-in-cheek”?!

One of my servers is in a Nanoxia Deep Silence case that supports 12 drives and 3 front panel bays. There are definitely cases that can house a lot of drives. If you're looking to add drives to your current case there are options too, especially if you have 5.25" front drive bays you can use. If you have 2 you can fit 3 more HDDS, and if you have 3 open you can get adapters that will let you put 5x 3.5" hdds! Beyond that I would start looking into net cases with lots of drive bays. They can be tower style like the Nanoxia I have, or more desktop/cube-ish like a Jonsbo NAS case

Hey, I just did 24h Mem Test, to be sure that the Memory is stable, but I didn't do any HDD burn in. My data is coming from a working NAS and I still have multiple copies of the imported files and I'm running a RaidZ2, so I'm taking my chances and hope that I'm not gonna lose 3 drives at the same time 🙂 Technically, I would need to loose at least 9 drives in various different NAS all at the same time before I start loosing my most important data. So yes, a dead drive is really more a nuisance at this point then a real issue with my current setup.

you might also enjoy this video about a homelab making duel

Yes you can select both and then both drives will be used for the boot pool. I don't know exactly how it works, but if your first boot drive dies you should be able to boot from your second drive and get back into operation

If you missed that option (like me 😬) during your install you can also do it after the fact

Can confirm, that's what I did and I have mirrored boot drives working flawlessly.

Also worth mentioning is that during HexOS installation, I noticed you can checkbox multiple drives for installation. I assume this creates a mirror pool of boot drives, thus giving you redundancy. After installation, it looks like you can add a second drive to the boot pool in TrueNAS (which is what I'll have to try, since I did not have an extra nvme when I first installed and I can't be bothered to reinstall at this point unless I really have to).

in the TrueNAS, you could juat import the existing pool, and your data still intach.. But as right now in beta, HexOS ignores all of existing pool and data and treat it as a new drives and wipes everything. Lets hope the developers acknowledge this and let us import the existing pool.