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Forum Discussion
Can they Readynas add new external hard drives VIA USB Ports?
Can Readynas add new external hard drives VIA USB Ports? There are often sales on external hard drive but they can't be placed inside the RAID unless you shuck them. Why not simple put like...
miogpsrocks wrote:
Could this be theroically possible in the future if the software was programed to expect (and wait) for these USB drives to come up and not kicked them out of the array so quickly.
Do you think this is possible or are there other underlying problems with combining internal drives with external USB drives which would make this never happen?
Given the current disk sizes, and the fairly recent introduction of 8 bay ReadyNAS, I don't see a lot of market demand here.
Personally I think this would be very fragile, and I wouldn't use a USB RAID array even if it were available.
There are other issues - one is that many USB drives (like desktop drives) are switching to SMR, which really isn't suitable for RAID. Cost is usually the most important factor for external drives, so it's hard to know what technology you are getting.
Plus it's not enough to just delay the mounting of the array at startup. You also need to handle the case where drives are unexpectedly dropped from the array when it is active. You'll end up with out-of-sync disks (and lost volumes) unless you had some form of disk-caching inside the NAS (similar to ReadyTier).
Is it possible, yes. Is it a good idea, no. I doubt that Netgear or any other vendor would want to offer support on such a product bacause of all the potentially bad things that can happen due to no fault of the NAS.
And, BTW, many of those USB drives are SMR, which is a poor choice for RAID anyway, shucked or in the USB case. And you really currently have no way of knowing it they'll keep the same internal drive in any model sold for external use.
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