Good evening community,

 

I have one quick question. I have a bunch of external drives, mainly older 1TB and 1,5TB WDs. Right now I´m thinking of connecting them to the Unraid server via USB and adding them into my array. My case can hold a couple of more drives with an additional HDD cage (which I would have to buy) and an additional SATA controller (which I also would have to buy). Buying both is not an option right now, but will be in a couple of month. Assuming I add those drives to the array now, do they get some kind of UID which identifies them to the server? If so, I should be able to pull them out of the external cases and put them into the internal HDD cage without having to set them up as new drives again, right?

Does anybody have experience with such swaps from external to internal?

 

Best regards

Gonozal

2 minutes ago, Gonozal said:

If so, I should be able to pull them out of the external cases and put them into the internal HDD cage without having to set them up as new drives again, right?

 

Mostly likely not, USB enclosures usually add stuff to the disk id.

5 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

 

Mostly likely not, USB enclosures usually add stuff to the disk id.

And possibly mangle the size of the drive. It really depends on the specific enclosure you are talking about. Test before trust.

 

USB array devices, while technically supported, are NOT a good idea. Speed and error handling suffer greatly.

 

Do you actually need the capacity of those drives right now? It's not a good idea to add spindles that aren't needed immediately. Each added drive makes recovery of a failed drive more risky.

Would be good to have the capacity of those drives, but I won´t put my files at risk. Right now I need another 1.5TB for my VMs and my LightRoom Library. And even that will not leave a whole lot of space after I copied the VMs/LR-Library over to the array. 

 

But I won´t put them into until I can be sure I can switch them later on. If that is not possible then the idea is dead anyway.

I agree with advice given.

 

Shucking the external is an option, and then adding directly to the array. But I will say, drives that have been in hot little USB enclosures tend to have reduced lifespan. YMMV

 

A 2T drive can be had very inexpensively. Here is one for under $50 on eBay. Hitachi 2T drives are awesomely reliable. I have a bunch of them in my backup array and started life well over 6 years ago in my primary array. I have 8 of them. They show zero signs of failure. These appear to be brand new and from a seller with 100% positive feedback. I'd look at something like this if it would fit in your finances rather than trying to repurpose the USB drives.

 

HGST 2T on eBay

I guess I will have to wait until I can afford the new cage and SATA controller. The drives I have are rather old and small (1,5TB and 2TB) and it seems that the risk is to high.

 

Thanks for your feedback.

45 minutes ago, Gonozal said:

I guess I will have to wait until I can afford the new cage and SATA controller. The drives I have are rather old and small (1,5TB and 2TB) and it seems that the risk is to high.

 

Thanks for your feedback.

 

I am not beyond snaking a SATA cable out of the back of my case, along with a pigtail or extension cable from the PSU, and hooking up a drive as a temporary configuration. So long as little fingers, toes, paws, and vacuum cleaners are not able to be in close contract. A 2 channel SATA controller only costs $15.

 

And i'll bet if you put a WTB request in the for sale forum, you would get some offers at a very low cost. I think I saw some 2T drives with clean smart reports going for like $20. A lot of us have spare parts in the bin that we'd just as soon get rid of than keep.

 

In the long run, I am recommending larger drives. Upping your parity from 2T to 4T, 5T or even 8T (currently the sweet spot for space on a per TB basis), can be a good option. But it depends on your projected storage needs, and it can get pricey to switch over. It sounds now is not a good time for that, hence the recommendations above.

 

Good luck!