How to you add massive amounts of USB drives to the Array?


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Shuck the drives from their shells and add them to your server as internal drives.

 

Or if you mean transferring the data, do it one drive at a time.  USB is a shared bus, so any time you transfer files from more than one device simultaneously, all transfers slow down.

 

 

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3 minutes ago, bman said:

Shuck the drives from their shells and add them to your server as internal drives.

 

Take care! Some USB controllers split the drive internally into smaller chunks.

The controller will report it as one drive, but if you connect the drive via SATA it will show up unpartitioned!

I've seen WD external drives do this!

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9 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

 

You can, doesn't mean you should add more than 1 or 2, since like bman already mentioned it's a shared bus.

Just wondering, Is it still a shared bus if you have multiple USB controllers, say, one per port group? I realize there is a CPU bottleneck with USB storage...

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11 hours ago, Fireball3 said:

 

Take care! Some USB controllers split the drive internally into smaller chunks.

The controller will report it as one drive, but if you connect the drive via SATA it will show up unpartitioned!

I've seen WD external drives do this!

 

The external Seagate Archive controllers do NOT do this. Preclearing the 8TB Seagate Archival drive in it's external enclosure and then moving it to internal SATA kept the preclear signature intact. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 2017-05-08 at 7:39 PM, ken-ji said:

Just wondering, Is it still a shared bus if you have multiple USB controllers, say, one per port group? I realize there is a CPU bottleneck with USB storage...

You can add more USB adapters too, until you run out of slots or PCIe lanes.  IMHO it's all a bit fidgety and I would just pop them into some 5-in-3 hot swap bays and attach with SATA/SAS and be done with the USB translation in the middle.

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