I did a search and tried to mount a usb drive and that worked, but when I went to the gui/web portal, the usb drive wasn't available for selection as one of the disk devices.

 

Is there a way to add a usb drive and assign it as one of the disk devices?

 

I followed these steps

 

cat /proc/partitions

mkdir /x

mount /dev/sdb1 /x

 

when I do

ls /x

I can see the files but when I go to the web portal, it's still not available to add as a device.

 

Is it possible to do this?

Currently, only IDE and SATA drives are 'eligible' for unRAID arrays, and perhaps SAS drives shortly.  There has been talk of adding SCSI and USB and other drives, but it is not available yet.

 

You are aware that a USB drive would seriously hurt performance?  Not that it should not be an option though ...  There are also serious issues and risks when you consider including any removable drives in a parity protected RAID array.

 

It is possible to make that drive available externally, but you need some Linux and Samba experience, or the right help from other users here.  I believe that UnMENU can make the job easier, but I do not think it has the capability to handle all of the Samba(?) config that is necessary.

thanks for the quick response.

the reason why i want to do this is because i wanted a build an unraid laptop server mainly for small files (documents) and no media files.

 

my current unraid server is being used as a media and backup server. most times its off.

i currently have a win2k3 server for the small files now, but is not being backed up nightly.

Currently, only IDE and SATA drives are 'eligible' for unRAID arrays, and perhaps SAS drives shortly.  There has been talk of adding SCSI and USB and other drives, but it is not available yet.

 

You are aware that a USB drive would seriously hurt performance?  Not that it should not be an option though ...  There are also serious issues and risks when you consider including any removable drives in a parity protected RAID array.

 

It is possible to make that drive available externally, but you need some Linux and Samba experience, or the right help from other users here.  I believe that UnMENU can make the job easier, but I do not think it has the capability to handle all of the Samba(?) config that is necessary.

It does set up SAMBA and it mounts the disk as read-only by default.   You would need to install the ntfs-3g driver, since the ntfs driver in unraid is read-only. (This is also possible using the package manager in unMENU) and then edit the unmenu.conf file to make the ntfs file-system  mount as writable instead of just read-only (if you wish to write to it, that is).  On the "Disk-Management" page in unMENU you will see a button next to the USB drive to mount it.  Once mounted, you can then share it on the LAN with another button.  Once shared, you can un-share it, once un-shared, you can un-mount it.... all with the buttons on that page. (No need for any command line stuff)

 

Here is a screen show showing a USB drive I have mounted... The buttons now available, now that it is mounted are those to un-mount it, it to share it on the LAN.

 

Now, once all that is in place, the USB drive will not be protected by the RAID array, but it will be accessible on the LAN.  Odds are it will be a very very long time before you will be able to assign a USB drive on the "Devices" page (if ever).   Performance would be VERY slow compared to the other drives.

 

Joe L.

I see you want to set up a laptop as a small file server.   Odds are your existing USB drive has an NTFS file-system.

 

unRAID uses reiserfs file-systems and the disk partitioning must be set up exactly as it expects, or it will actually present a button to format the drive before it adds it to the array.   Tom has indicated at some time in the future he would like to support other file-systems, but for now... don't hold your breath waiting as he is in the middle of working up changes for version 5.0 of unRAID with a completely new API to the user-interface. 

 

Joe L.