My hardware only has 5 SATA ports in the server, which I have all full.  I really want to add a cache drive so I can take advantage of the Docker.  Therefore I was thinking about the WD Pi Drive http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-314gb/ which is a drive with a native USB interface.  Since my system has USB ports inside on the mother board I was thinking this might solve my problem.  Does anyone have experience with doing somethign like this?

unRAID does not support USB drives as cache/data/parity drives.

You can on 6.2-beta.

You can on 6.2-beta.

I must admit I missed that - but on checking the release notes I see it mentioned.

You can on 6.2-beta.

I must admit I missed that - but on checking the release notes I see it mentioned.

I missed it too

Wow

 

- support USB storage devices assignable to array and cache/pool

 

Just noticed it too

 

going to be very interesting to see how that works.

Tested USB3 SSD as cache and works very well, curious to see how they work on the array, especially several disks sharing a USB3 connection.

If it supports a USB drive now, how about a USB flash drive?

You can, but don't think it's a good idea, flash drives don't have the best write endurance, probably won't last long as a cache disk.

Did you happen to notice whether the temperature and other SMART data can be read, johnnie? In my experience smartctl compatibility with the various USB-SATA bridge chips is patchy at best.

 

Did you happen to notice whether the temperature and other SMART data can be read, johnnie? In my experience smartctl compatibility with the various USB-SATA bridge chips is patchy at best.

 

 

Can see temperature and all SMART attributes, can't do any SMART tests, it shows "Unavailable - disk must be spun up"

I realized that I have an eSATA port so I'm going to try and route a cable out to that and install a 2.5" drive someplace in the case.