Hello again everyone, and welcome to another defective issue, from the cheapskate owner of defective hardware.

Since I seem to have inherited the unraid box I set up ages ago, but don't have a use for anymore, I'm playing around and doing silly things with it.

So what's todays silly thing?

 

I'm wondering if it's possible to have a disk image, saved to the USB drive that unraid is booting from, mounted and accessible as part of the array. 

 

Yes, I'm fully aware that this is a bad idea for a whole list of reasons, one of the big ones being the lifespan impact on the USB drive.

The drive I'm stuck with at the moment is only 8GB, USB 2.0, and not high performance at that. It'll almost certainly run badly.

I don't even have any solid plans as to what to do with another 6GB of array storage, unless I set it up as a "portable" server, running basic tasks on any computer, without having to lug around a pile of metal bricks.

 

So, stupid of an idea as I have here, is it possible with unraid?

I doubt you can even make this happen. Unraid must partition and format any disk it will add to the array. How would you even get it to allow you to select a "disk image" as a disk to add to the array?

Well, I have no idea how to get it to let me select an image, hence why I'm asking

I guess I'm thinking along the lines of 'Linux can do anything I know how to make it do', but I know next to nothing about Linux (yet (working on it (eventually))), so asking stupid questions and hoping for a miracle is all I got.

15 minutes ago, DefectiveServer said:

I know next to nothing about Linux

Then I would say you can't do it.

 

I really can't imagine why you would even want to. Stupid idea, for all the reasons you have already given. The stupidest part is wanting to bother with a "drive" in the array that is only 6GB.

 

You can of course plug in some other drive and use it however you want as an Unassigned Device. You can even use space on the boot flash and many of us do. I have scripts there. See the User Scripts plugin for example.

 

So what exactly would you hope to accomplish by having this "drive" as part of the parity array?

 

I really feel like I have been wasting my time even replying to this thread. It is a joke, right?

Not a joke, just a dumb idea. Possibly having dockers on it? I didn't get far enough to figure out any use, just wanted to play with things to see what I can do with it.

Sorry if you wasted your time, though I pretty clearly labeled my dumb idea as what it is.