Just throwing this out:  As a future feature, being able to create an array of external USB hard drives.  Either in addition-to or instead-of SATA & IDE hard drives.

 

I have no idea what the performance would be like.  I'd guess that normal read/write of single streams would be just fine, but reconstruct might be dog-slow.

 

As I fill my  5th external USB drive, I realize that I've got to take a new approach and I'm looking at unRaid.  This is an old topic (over a year ago), but support for USB arrays would allow me to use the USB drives while I migrate to SATA over time.  What ever happened to this idea... Did you find USB Arrays too slow?  Or was there just no interest? 

 

=alanjudy

 

One option might be to extract the drive from its enclosure and add to your unRaid. Once you add a new SATA to the array and move the data, you could recommission your USB drive.

Still it would be interesting. Plus ability to read (at least just read for file moving reasons) external storage in FAT32 and NTFS (both can be mounted in linux after all).

 

(why do topics get so long to be replied btw?)

 

 

Still it would be interesting. Plus ability to read (at least just read for file moving reasons) external storage in FAT32 and NTFS (both can be mounted in linux after all).

 

(why do topics get so long to be replied btw?)

 

 

 

Most topics get responses from the user community within a few hours.  There are, of course, exceptions, but this isn't avsforum where there are tens of thousands of active members.

 

 

Bill

sure - I was curious more about the forum admins (or admin) though...

 

 

The very small crew behind unraid is hopefully focusing on a new release, or (speculating) changing the foundation of the company.

Unraid is a small but very cool piece of software, but in danger of being drowned in hardwaresupport for hundreds of different pieces of hardware. Feature requests are fairly simple, and looking at the laundrylist the overall prioritisation is clear.

Unraid as is today, is for my sake, very much worth the money, the rest is just for fun.

There is allways a new feature one wants, and for sure, once they are all there, we will complain about the complexity :-)

/Rene

 

Nice summary.  The good/bad part of the decision process was that Tom started off selling a complete HW/SW solution which eliminated the vagaries of hardware complexity, but the group opinion was that the crowd that wanted Unraid was the same crowd that was more DIY.  So we got the freedom we wanted from a HW perspective but are now having issues with support of that hardware.

 

Be careful what you wish for.  ;-)

 

BTW, I am ecstatic with what we have, so don't take the above as complaining - it's just an observation.

 

 

Bill

 

As I have bunch of external USB harddrives, I thought that this might be a good idea. So I opened emhttp in my favourite hex editor and patched the binary not to hide usb drives in devices screen.

 

I can understand why unraid people have decided not to allow usb drives by default as there are a few issues:

1. your unraid/boot flash drive is available as option, so you can screw your boot if you assing it to the array.

2. some usb harddrives dont have unique serial numbers, like when I tried Lacie Porches, they returned 0 as serial, and thus was not visible in "Main"-screen, so there would be potential compatibility issues on some of the usb drives and I bet that unraid people dont want to get complaints about those.

 

But for the drives which have serial, like lacie 1TB bigger disk and WD MyBook 1TB, it was added to the array nicely. And what goes to performance problems, well we all know the limits of usb2 transfer speeds, and most of the usb drives dont return the temperature of the harddrive. Other than that, it worked just fine, so potentially it would be ok to put some advanced option for pro users to enable usb in the menu, if you put some checkbox that there is no support if you screw things up.

 

But most likely we will not see usb support in official binaries, so you would either have to binary patch the server, or manually append slots of the major and major number of the usb harddrive and manually restart unraid driver with modprobe md-mod super=/boot/config/super.dat slots=[xxx]. But then again, if you don't know what your doing, then its just better to remove the harddrive from the usb case and put it inside unraid box.

 

 

 

Did you let unRAID partition and format your USB drives?  I would expect that most people with external USB drives will have then formatted already, usually with NTFS ot FAT32 file systems.    I would also expect that if unRAID did not find a reiserfs (or rather, could not mount it as a reiserfs) it would present the format option.

 

Optimally, each (data) disk drive on the devices page could have an additional drop-down for the file  system type.  Then, we could use other supported file systems, format them as required, verify the expected format when it attempts to mount them as the specified type, etc.  It would then be easy to add a USB NTFS drive using the ntfs-3g driver.

 

Joe L.

 

Yes, originally it had ntfs as filesystem, so it recognized it as a new harddrive and it zeroed/formatted the drive to be reiserfs. Well that is what I wanted since there is no use to keep ntfs/fat drives in reiserfs journaled raid array. Or would make sense only as seperate cache drive, if you have 500gig data in ntfs usb drive that you want to import to array, and you would plug it in and assign it as cache drive and the data would be transferred to array over night. and unassing/unplug when data has been moved.

Not sure why anyone would want to hook up an external USB drive to the unRAID array on a permanent basis.  The idea of having separately powered USB drives, which tend to be in poorly ventilated enclosures, and are slow as molassas compared to IDE/SATA, seems counter intuitive.  In my experience, these drives are the least reliable drives.

 

1.  I'd either break open the box to harvest the disk inside and make it an internal drive; or

2.  Want to hook it up temporarily (using FAT or HTFS) to copy some data to or from.

 

The only thought that came to mind was if you wanted to assemble several USB drives and hook them up to form a portable array - one that you would hookup for archival purposes, for example.  You could then store them offline for long periods of time and hook them up if needed in the future.  This would help provent data loss from long term storage.  This is way down on the totem pole as far as enhancement requests go, at least for me.

I have a box that allows 4 IDE drives to be seen as JBOD or a multitude of raid1/raid0 drives.

So I see the ability to use USB drives is a PLUS.

or we could ask the makers of this USB box, to allow for smb mounting of remote drives and mount unRAID ON them... (of course your mail request will just go on their junk folder along with a nice "thank you for your mail" auto reply)

 

oh, come on... these are things that are useless to 95% of users here (don't start arguing about the percentage) and will make unRAID a nice bloatware

 

I would love EASY mounting of USB disks (NTFS/FAT/FAT32 or any of the "semi-native" linux fs), without going to the console, just to copy files to/from (which is a VERY common scenario), but that's about it.

 

 

Bloatware? There's probably just a filter to stop the USB drives from being shown.

If someone could just patch a binary to let them be visible, then I hardly think allowing them to be used is bloatware.

 

Have you seen the pre-reqs for TorrentFlux? Now that's bloatware!

 

no I definitely don't need it to be included in the distribution

 

I would like to be able to add it using a package or something

 

in any case nobody would force anybody to use (even a preinstalled in distribution) torrent client - like nobody forces anybody to use MC, but is there (in the betas), doesn't affect anybody, unless you need it and just type "mc"

 

on the other hand, having extra controls to show USB drives, add support for disconnecting them gracefully, implementing security in case they are NOT disconnected gracefully (it is just USB after all), esp. when being part of the array (scared about the thought)...

 

I'd never ask Tom why my "unRAID torrent client is not as fast as uTorrent", while this request opens Pandora's box (maybe not for you, but you have to think what happens with all us newbies that already think it is complex enough)...

 

anyway, all these (like everythink discussed in all such threads) are for Tom to decide (now, that can be a vanity thought eh? :D)...

 

 

here my opinion... its a great idea (if performance is ok).

 

USB drives die alot but who cares if unRAID is protecting them. USB would be a killer app for unRAID since it opens it up for a whole new market.

 

Forget fancy SATA cards and chassis along with PSU specs etc... a n00b can buy a PC and attach a dose of USB. Done.

 

Great idea IMO

Performancewise, when the box was sata 3.0Gbps only, then parity sync was something along the lines of 57MB/s.

But when adding 1.5Gbps drives sync speed dropped somewhere to 34MB/s, and when adding USB2 drives, sync speed still was somewhere over 30MB/s.

So performance as such should be pretty ok at least in theory (didn't do any extensive smoketesting on it). Don't know how reliable linux usb drivers are, and how they handle under heavy loads. Or some usb cases might have some internal powersaving logic which might cause incompatibility issues, yet another theoretical issue

 

Harvesting 1TB single drives is usually wise option. But in some cases like Lacie bigger disk, 1TB drive is actually 4x250GB ide drives, and you might not want to harvest them inside your unraid box, as they would eat multiple slots.

For reliability I would keep all drives internal. But it could be useful option as quite many people have collected multiple usb drives before having the unraid box and for normal users it might sound logical to be able to reuse the drives in the unraid array (especially if they dont know how to open the case and harvest the drives ...), as otherwise those drives would just eat dust without use.

 

I personally just harvested most of the drives to second unraid box which I dedicated to old ide&usb drives and left the lacie without harvesting, and ordered couple pci ide and pci sata1 cards from ebay (as you can get those at cost of under 10e with postage included from hong kong (shame that pcie sata2 cards are still so expensive (20e with postage))). Now I have bunch of empty lacie porche usb drive cases without use, don't know what to do with them, garbage most likely...

Now I have bunch of empty lacie porche usb drive cases without use, don't know what to do with them, garbage most likely...

 

EBay?

 

If this feature is available, it will open unRaid to using outdated laptops/notebook which is what I like to do.

 

I'm not too concerned about performance, I just need enough speed to stream a DVD movie.  When I log in on the unRaid console, it already sees the USB drives as SCSI drives.