Server System drive on a USB stick? Good? Bad?

This is a follow up to this question.

I am assembling a storage server with 14 SATA drives.

I don't want to "waste" a drive for the OS system, so I thought I could isntall and run the OS from a USB stick. The system will be very skinny (just a webserver and ssh deamon and some custom scripts).

Is there any reason I should not do this? Like USB stick durability, etc? Do you have any experiences with running server systems from usb sticks?

I noticed that FreeNAS recommends running it from a USB stick.

Solution 1:

The main consideration is making sure the OS doesn't swap, and/or doesn't write much to the flash memory. The USB stick, like a compact flash or SD card (and to a far lesser extent, SSD) has a limited number of write cycles so if you've got something thrashing it constantly for swap you may find it wears out prematurely.

The Sun X4540 systems we've got here use a compact flash card for the OS, and as the other poster said, VMWare ESXi has a embedded version which runs off a stick, in both cases the idea is to liberate your physical disks for actually storing your data, rather than the OS. In the case of the Sun configuration, it is officially supported and they make some suggestions in the install guide for Solaris and Linux here (page 79) .

Solution 2:

Well, ESXi Embedded runs off of a USB Stick - and I have had zero issues with performance or anything for that matter. As long as it's Unix based I see no issues.

Solution 3:

No - it's a good idea - unlike CDROM booting, maintaining patches customer config is a lot simpler. Just make sure you do as the others said and keep all the logs / swap space elsewhere.

But wouldn't it be just as easy to boot it across a network?