Non-btrfs disk in the NAS

Equinox wrote:
any chance of getting a non-raid volume in the ReadyNAS that is NTFS or Ext3/4?

No

External enclosures is the way to go?

Yes.

The 104 does have some USB3 ports on the rear. It also has some eSATA ports.

Equinox wrote:
External enclosures is the way to go?

For backup, either USB (or eSata) or over the network. Using USB for sharing is (in my opinion) not the best idea.

For copying, over a wired gigabit network is fastest - otherwise you are copying twice.

What are you wanting to do with the non-btrfs volume?

The use-case is very simple: get a drive to or from another machine, put it the nas and read/write it.

This comes in handy when bringing data from other machines, or when backing up data from the 'big' RAID volume is necessary. External enclosures are clunky, slow and add complexity to the set-up.

OS6 being a debian linux, such trick shouldnt be hard to do, and not even at UI level. Mount the volume in whatever supported FS, paint it yellow, pink or any other exotic colour, block any raid possibility, and there you have it.

But I do understand the drive not to do this, from a marketing and dev priority perspective.

There are other reasons such as damaging hardware. SATA connectors are designed for a limited number of pulls. Then there's handling disks bare and the risk of ESD without realising anything has happened.

I use an external USB + eSATA drive dock connected for this. Cheap, low replacement cost, and I can use it on any device/computer (generally I'll use a computer as it is faster thanks to eSATA, and copy the data over the network).

But why mess about pulling drives when you can rsync (or any other network copy method) ?

itsjasper wrote:
...But why mess about pulling drives when you can rsync (or any other network copy method) ?

I agree. Even eSata doesn't result in any performance gain, given that you need to first write the data to the external drive, then read it back on the NAS.