Hi all,

 

I couldn't find any recent threads on this, but wondered if anyone had any experience of running a USB drive as parity?

 

The situation I have is that I have 10 disks currently in the machine using all of the available sata ports, but i recently had two drives fail within a week, meaning I lost a fair bit of data. I'd like to add a second parity to avoid this situation again, but the only option I have is to add this via a USB to Sata converter. It would be USB 3, so relatively quick, but any forseeable problems?

Many thanks for any responses.

USB attached devices while supported aren't recommended.  Primarily due to the terrible nature of USB and it's tendency (on all platforms) to disconnect / reconnect for no apparent reason.

4 minutes ago, Sap1ent said:

i recently had two drives fail within a week

TBH, most drive "failures" are connection issues (ie: reseat the cabling) vs actual drive failures.

Thank you, almost as soon as i'd posted I found a similar thread and realised it was probably unwise.

Re: the drive failures, agreed, but I changed both cables etc, but these were the same batch and were 'clicking' for want of a better word, so think they'd had it, they were pretty old.

19 minutes ago, Sap1ent said:

were 'clicking' for want of a better word,

Clicking can also be a sign of a lack of enough power. I've seen many instances of a drive needing more spin up current than the wiring can support without voltage sag due to high resistance from splitters, or simply just a marginal PSU. Replacing the drive with a newer model tends to "solve" the issue because newer circuits need less current.

 

I'm not saying your drives are good or bad, but it wouldn't hurt to put them in a different computer and run the manufacturers diagnostic on them.

Thanks for the info - had never considered that. Will give them a run and a full test in another machine before I dump them