January 19, 20242 yr My R710 has hot swap bays. I'll be putting together a new server and I'm trying to decide what to do with the backup drive that I rotate with a drive at work. I usually spin down the drive, unmount it, then pop it out. What do folks use hardware-wise for backup on their server for the offsite part assuming no cloud services? A simple USB external drive or a (trayless) hot swap bay? If USB, I'd be concerned with the power draw from the power supply brick. I could spin down the drive, but I think the brick would still draw power. If hot swap, what would I need to support this function - just an HBA card? And the bay, of course, like a StarTech.com 5.25" to 3.5" trayless. Edited January 19, 20242 yr by nraygun
March 7, 20242 yr Author Closed due to no responses. I think I'll go with a trayless StarTech bay for the backup drive and rotate it off site. Not knowing how true hotswaps work, I'll just power down the server and remove the drive.
March 7, 20242 yr I just tested this myself. I plugged in a hdd in my trusted 'icy dock black vortex' and it showed up in 'Unassigned Devices'. You could set it to auto mount and run a backup-script automatically. Then i un-mounted the drive, took it out and connected it to my linux-vm through usb. I don't know much about file-systems so i'm not 100% sure this is recommended.
March 7, 20242 yr Author 8 minutes ago, Aran said: I just tested this myself. I plugged in a hdd in my trusted 'icy dock black vortex' and it showed up in 'Unassigned Devices'. You could set it to auto mount and run a backup-script automatically. Then i un-mounted the drive, took it out and connected it to my linux-vm through usb. I don't know much about file-systems so i'm not 100% sure this is recommended. Thanks for testing @Aran! That's what I was doing on my R710. What I would do is spin it down, unmount it, then pop it out. Then I'd pop in the other drive and it picked it up. I usually leave the backup drive in the system so it backs up everyday. I'll be going with a non-server hardware config when I upgrade so I don't know if this process is officially supported. It's important backup data so I better play it safe and just power down, pop in/out, then power back on. The reboots of the server every so often might do some good too.
March 7, 20242 yr Having recently setup my first Unraid server in a Dell Vostro, I tested this... * Startech 3-bay 3.5-5.25 trayless and 2x 2bay 2.5" trayless... * 5 bays connected to motherboard SATA ports, 2 bays connected to ASM1062 mini-pcie card. With 2 SSds installed as a pool, and one 3.5" disk to allow me to start the array (all on mobo ports), I was happily able to swap disks in and out of the other four bays while benchmarking the disks I had on-hand. I did not even bother to spin them down before ejecting them... Cheers.
March 8, 20242 yr Author 3 hours ago, Aran said: Don't forget to enable hot swap function in the bios. If it's there... Thanks @Fraddles! What's your process to pop the drives out? Do you at least unmount? @Aran - Good call on the BIOS. I'm going with an Asrock Z690 RS and a post I found says it supports "hot plug" in BIOS by port: https://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=24664 So, I can get a Startech trayless 3.5 for the 5.25 bay and do what I was doing on my R710. Nice!
March 8, 20242 yr Have fun.I have two of my vortex hot swap bays passed through to a clonezilla vm so i can clone my non-unraid drives without much hassle.
March 8, 20242 yr @nraygun I did not have them mounted, but yes, if they were mounted I would unmount them first. I am thinking of using a similar system to you for offline backups once I get this all setup how I want it. Cheers
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