Does unraid support external hard drives?

[JorgeB]

4 hours ago, John_M said:

I think eSATA is worth considering as an option.

Better than USB (for single drive at least) but I still wouldn't recommended it, eSATA cables are known to be flaky, and port multipliers are definitely not recommended, glad yours is working well but it's likely the exception, I keep finding users with errors related to port multipliers.

[aaronwt]

On 4/20/2018 at 2:45 AM, johnnie.black said:

Better than USB (for single drive at least) but I still wouldn't recommended it, eSATA cables are known to be flaky, and port multipliers are definitely not recommended, glad yours is working well but it's likely the exception, I keep finding users with errors related to port multipliers.

I've been using External eSATA cases with port mUltiplier cards with unRAID since 2011. I've not had any issues. Currently I use twelve external 4 and 5 bay eSATA enclosures with my three unRAID setups for array drives. And I use a 1 bay ESATA enclosure for the cache drive with each unRAID setup.

 

49TB unRAID1a--53TB unRAID2--72TB unRAID3

 

 

 

Edited July 18, 2019 by aaronwt

[ArthurM]

are the problems from 2018 still current for devices like these as far as passing smart data?
https://www.sabrent.com/product/DS-SC5B/usb-3-2-5-bay-3-5-sata-hard-drive-tray-less-docking-station/
would like to expand my array. My unraid hardware is pretty capped as far as sata ports, was thinking of adding a pci 2.0 usb 3.2 card.

Thanks for any feedback <3

 

[JonathanM]

4 minutes ago, ArthurM said:

My unraid hardware is pretty capped as far as sata ports, was thinking of adding a pci 2.0 usb 3.2 card.

If you have the power supply and physical space for internal drives, get one of the recommended SATA or SAS PCIe cards. If you are limited in power supply or space, get one of the SAS cards with an external connector and an external SAS enclosure.

 

USB has a habit of momentarily resetting the connection causing the drive to be dropped from the array.

[doubleopinter]

Hey I'm kind of looking to do something like this but only to use the drives as single units, not part of any array. I'm running unraid on a qnap nas so I'm tapped out for space and would love to just be able to add a two slot external USB enclosure. Is there anything to look for or avoid in terms of USB enclosures?

[Squid]

20 minutes ago, doubleopinter said:

Is there anything to look for or avoid in terms of USB enclosures?

One biggie is that some USB enclosures while they will show 2 separate drives, they will assign each drive the identical serial number which throws everything for a loop.  Not sure if there's a list or anything like that of what suffers from this bug kicking around

[doubleopinter]

3 hours ago, Squid said:

One biggie is that some USB enclosures while they will show 2 separate drives, they will assign each drive the identical serial number which throws everything for a loop.  Not sure if there's a list or anything like that of what suffers from this bug kicking around

Ooh I saw this mentioned in another thread, thanks for reminding me! Appreciate the response, I'll have to dig around a bit.