Connecting a laptop to unRaid hard drives via USB

[milkywayster]

A question I have searched and searched, and cannot find the answer for!

 

I would like to occasionally walk over and connect a Mac laptop directly to my (potential new) unRaid hard drives themselves by USB, and for them to appear on my hard drive as directly attached external storage. Is this possible?

 

Or alternatively (the best way I can think of how), I can connect it to the unRaid server PC via USB, would they appear as external drives on my macOS?

 

[trurl]

No

 

Your Unraid server is a computer. You connect it to other computers just like you do with any other computer, with a network.

[milkywayster]

Thanks @trurl!

 

Just to clarify, my unRaid hard drives are in a separate HD enclosure, while unRaid OS is running off an attached PC. 

 

If I wanted physically connect by USB to the HARD DRIVES themselves (in the enclosure, that are used by unRaid), not the PC... it wouldn’t able to appear as a external HDD on my laptop?

 

It a very noob question 🙈

[Frank1940]

You had best not try this unless you understand how Unraid uses parity.  Accessing the drives can cause parity to become invalid!!!!!!!!! 

 

Now, as to your real question, yes, the PC should be able to mount and access the drives in the housing via its USB port if your PC supports reading--and-writing  of the format that the drives are using-- reiserfs, XFS or btfrs.  

[trurl]

58 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

You had best not try this unless you understand how Unraid uses parity.  Accessing the drives can cause parity to become invalid!!!!!!!!! 

I would say that you shouldn't try this even if you understand Unraid parity. Any attempt to access the disks without Unraid is going to invalidate parity even if you are able to read the filesystems. And Windows, for example, won't be able to read them anyway.

 

Are you saying your Unraid is using a USB connection to your drives? That is probably going to be a source of numerous problems anyway and it would be better to rethink your design.

 

Why are you using Unraid? What do you want it to do for you?

[John_M]

FWIW, your Mac can't natively read any of the file systems that unRAID array disks use anyway.

[Delarius]

I might be missing something, but I just don't see the great utility in plugging into 'unRaid drives' directly. If you want to do this, you could certainly just manually assign a reasonable IP address to both the Mac and unRAID and use a network cable between the two to 'directly plug into' your server then mount via SMB/NFS - whatever you prefer. Given expected speeds of spinning disks there's little benefit to plugging in via usb directly.

If for some strange reason this is absolutely needed, you'd need to start with FUSE on your Mac (which is a whole other can of worms and suffers from some performance hits anyways.)

However, the posts above are correct - unless you're prepared for a complete rebuild of parity (and have excellent backups) don't do this. Use the native abilities of unRAID to your advantage.

[FixYouDeveloper]

A valid usecase these days is the 40Gps thunderbolt 3 connection (or 4) for an ssd only unraid array.

2026 coming around the corner - it's looking certain we'll see SSDs over taking HDD in terms of price. 

Of course - we can also look at more expensive fibre transceivers...

Is there a way to emulate a tcp/ipv4 adapter over usb i wonder (most likely, but not ideal)

Edited October 13, 2021 by FixYouDeveloper
options.

[FixYouDeveloper]

linux does allow usb slave.. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.16/driver-api/usb/gadget.htm

 

I'm feeling this would be a really nice beta gadget feature - but probably not widely used enough to be stable.