Reading drives via USB


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I have a large HD of 2 TB files that I want to bring over to unraid. The formatting of the drive is in Mac OS X Extended as NTFS is shaky and FAT32 doesn't support large enough file sizes for this situation.

 

Can unraid read (not add to the array, just read) and copy data over from the USB (its USB 3.0) drive into the array?

 

I tried to search already and either have terrible skills or only found this addressed with other partition applications.

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Since unraid doesn't fully support USB 3.0, it would be faster to transfer the files over a gigabit network than it would to plug the drive directly into the unraid box. Whether or not unraid handles that partition type is a whole nother question, but not really relevant considering it would be slower anyway.

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I do have a full gigabit system. I guess that I was under the impression that even USB 2.0 still out performed gigabit in real world (not theoretical) speeds. Good to know then and it may be a moot point then since my mac can obviously transfer to the unraid regardless of the USB drive's partition scheme.

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you should be able to get close to double that on a gigabit transfer.

 

Actually, it's unlikely it makes any difference whether you're using USB v2 or v3 => UnRAID's WRITE speeds aren't likely to be higher than you can sustain with USB v2 ... UNLESS you're writing to a system without a parity drive.

 

READ speeds are a different matter altogether ... if you're using modern 1TB/platter drives UnRAID can easily saturate a Gb network connection, so if you were copying the other way (from UnRAID to a USB disk) then v3 would be a big advantage.

 

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Thanks for the clarification. Just for the bump/clarification --does anyone know if it is possible to connect an Apple formatted USB drive directly to unraid?

 

I'm not aware of any utility that allows this, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's some Linux utility that can do it => perhaps a "Linux guy" can chime in and suggest one.

 

Note, however, that it won't be any faster to do that than to simply copy the files over your Gb network -- the bottleneck is the UnRAID write speed ... which is slower than your network, so a direct attachment won't be faster.

 

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