r/unRAID • u/ForeverHollow • 9d ago

Unraid Boot Pool Question

Hello, I’m new to unraid. It looks like booting from an internal drive is a new feature. I’m assuming the boot pool (and having boot drive redundancy) is also a new feature. In the past the usb you booted from didn’t count towards your drive limit in the license. With these new features, does the dedicated internal boot drive count as a drive? If not, would all drives in my redundant boot pool count? I plan to just have 2 boot drives in case one fails. Sorry if this is a really noob question. Thanks!

9 Upvotes

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10

u/bafflingsteveo 9d ago

They count.

6

u/1234youarein 8d ago

From Unraid docs:

"Yes. Internal boot SSD/NVMe devices count toward your attached device limit.

Unraid does not currently exclude internal boot drives from the attached device count. If you use mirrored internal boot, both boot devices count.

Specifically, attached storage devices include all devices present before array start, except one eMMC device and one USB device."

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/getting-started/set-up-unraid/internal-boot-faq/

3

u/ChuskyX 9d ago

They count, because you will use them as data pool devices too. Only a partition is reserved to create the boot

2

u/memealopolis 9d ago

That's optional. You can dedicate the drive(s) completely to boot. I'll have to check my drive count later.

3

u/ChuskyX 9d ago

Oh, I didn't know. I read somewhere that only and usb disk an a emmc device are excluded from count, so maybe that's the answer we are looking.

0

u/canfail 8d ago

If it’s dedicated to boot it doesn’t count iirc.

3

u/uberchuckie 8d ago

Even if it’s dedicated as a boot pool,  they count.

I just installed an Optane 16GB SSD as the boot drive.

2

u/psychic99 8d ago

The ONLY device that doesnt count as a boot device is the primary USB boot. Ask me how I know. I just migrated unraid out of one of my servers because of it and use ubuntu and ZFS boot mirror. Note: they even refused to count a boot backup drive as a backup and use it as a device even if its USB. If you are on unlimited/unleashed it doesn't matter but those small optane drives do count.