Can a NAS external hard drive be used as a warehouse drive? After three months of testing, the power supply system dropped three pitfalls

the N100 dual-drive Feiniu at home, two ports were already packed last year: 4T cool wolf outfit for photos and documentaries, and a 500GB old SSD dedicated to feeding QBittorrent. At the beginning of the year, I cleared out over 400GB from the pool, but couldn't keep up with the documentary dropping season by season, and by last month, it was down to just over 20GB. Forget about adding a tray. The case only has two ports, and the money needed to replace the four-bay machine is enough to buy four more units. the money saved on trays back then now all of that has been made up. I rummaged through the drawer and found two portable hard drives: one 2.5-inch Seagate 1TB, and one 3.5-inch Western Digital 4TB with a power supply enclosure. Both are plugged in, and it's been three months since then. To be honest,

to clarify first: it can be plugged in and recognized, but external warehouses and storage pools are two different things

many people think that once the external hard drive is plugged in, the capacity automatically merges into the NAS pool. No, that's not it. Synology and Feiniu share the same temperament: a USB drive can never enter storage; it's an independent external device: Synology sees it in the external device and File Station, Feiniu sees it in the file management external storage. If you want to share it with family, you have to attach it to a separate shared directory.

means three things. First, the snapshots, recycle bin, and permission details in the pool have nothing to do with it. Deleting files is deleting them. accidental deletion and rescue methods are greatly discounted on external drives and most of the formats are NTFS that don't use snapshots. Second, it doesn't participate in RAID, with no redundancy at all—if it fails, it's broken. Third, directories like photo gallery or docker that need to be written to storage should not be on a USB drive; once firmware is upgraded or leaked, it can easily lose its place.

so the positioning is set correctly: inserting a portable hard drive into a NAS is like finding a storage room outside the yard for Chizi, where you can put it and take it out, that's all. If you really want to expand your portfolio, the right path is to switch to a larger property and migrate. the article about moving and relocating I wrote about the full process.

there's another easily overlooked action: before unplugging the drive, click Uninstall in the background, just like safely popping up a USB drive on your computer. One time, I was in a hurry and unlocked the backup task before finishing it. The next time I mounted NTFS, it took me over ten minutes to fix the directory before it recovered. The log format is better than exFAT in this regard and repairs well, but you have to give it time to fix it.

three types of projects and three fate: the power supply account is the easiest to mess up

my two projects, their fates are completely different—the difference lies in the electricity.

The

3.5-inch Western Digital enclosure comes with a built-in 12V power supply, so plug it in for stability. After three months of use, SMB managed large file reads of 138MB/s and writes of 121MB/s. This figure is better than I expected: gigabit ports themselves are only around 110MB/s, meaning the bottleneck doesn't even reach USB ports. The theoretical bandwidth of 5Gbps in 3.0 is more than enough to feed mechanical drives. Downloading, backing up, and TV pulling videos — never dropped the link.

2.5-inch Seagate bare insert isn't as decent. The first two days were fine, but on the third day, I deleted the download task in the early morning, a USB reset in DMESG, the drive disappeared from the system and then came back on its own. Root is power supply: USB 3.0 standard only gives 900mA per port, and when starting a 2.5-inch mechanical drive, the motor needs to surge above 1A. Normally, it runs at a steady speed without issue, but when it wakes up during sleep or writes to the motor to catch its breath, the voltage drops at the slightest shake. Plugging the same drive into the computer's rear port works well, with plenty of power on the motherboard and no shaking.

If you really want to hang

2.5-inch drives long-term, there are three options: a hard drive enclosure with independent power supply, a Y-type dual-head cable to wipe the power to both ports, or if that doesn't work, just don't hang it up—plug and unplug it. My old laptop was converted into an experimental NAS, and in the end, it only stopped after switching to an eDrive cable with 12V power. the whole process was recorded in that .

format multiple-choice question: Windows, NAS, and TV can only please two

Whether you plug in

drive or not depends on the format. This is the most common mistake of "casually setting up ext4"—NAS is comfortable and performs best, but from now on, plugging this drive into any Windows computer requires third-party software to read it, which can be extremely frustrating in emergencies.

Synology DSM7 supports external drives, including Btrfs, ext4, FAT32, NTFS, and exFAT. For some firmware reading exFAT, you need to first install the free exFAT package from the kit center. Feiniu is even more worry-free. After version 0.9.2, you can insert NTFS, exFAT, and FAT32 drives and read them directly without formatting—I've benefited from this.

exFAT looks perfect—Windows, Mac, and TV are all recognized, but it doesn't have logs, and the worst thing is losing power halfway through writing. The disk hanging on the NAS is read and written by tasks every day, so power outages are not uncommon in the NAS community. So I kept both drives on NTFS: the slower write speed than ext4, and monthly incremental backups barely noticed, making it easy to plug in to any computer at any time.

slowing down and line drops: Writing large files on a tiled tray reveals the truth

there's another major performance pitfall: most 2.5-inch portable hard drives on the market are laminated drives. My Seagate folder is one — over 80GB of documentary folder inside, the first 30GB can run 90MB/s, which looks pretty nice; The built-in cache on the corrugated drive drops to 20-30 Mbps as soon as it finishes writing, and the final 10GB is like squeezing out toothpaste. When the warehouse disk is written once and read multiple times, it's fine, but the target drive is written every day. The speed drop is really bad for you.

How can

tell them apart? Copying a big file to monitor the second half, fast at the start, slow at the end, cliff-like — basically a stacked tile. Before buying, search for model number plus SMR to check for more stability. the about the old issue of Western Digital 2020 tiles not labeling was criticized. The main alternative is to install CMR drives like Cool Wolf or Galaxy in 3.5-inch enclosures, and spend a few dozen yuan more to buy a reliable one.

troubleshooting disconnections is also simple. If the drive disappears, don't unplug it yet. Go in for SSH and type a line on DMESG to check the last few dozen lines. Messages like USB reset timeout or device disconnection and reconnection basically indicate power supply or cable contact issues. Replace the cable, replace the port, and add power supply in three steps. If you doubt the drive itself, remember to add the -d SAT parameters for SMART testing. the new drive inspection article mentioned USB bridging. Additionally, USB drives have more aggressive automatic sleep than internal drives. Wake-up failures are a common issue, which is the opposite of internal drives where one can't sleep and the other can't wake up.

my usage: overflow warehouse with cold standby transfer, don't let it get involved in the pool

after three months of use, I assigned two tasks to the USB drive, and both did well.

first is overflow warehouses. The 4T section is hung under the shared directory as an archive. After downloading and moving the documentary you watched, the pool immediately clears space, and the TV directs to this directory to play. It's no different from the files in the pool, since the gigabit port is the real bottleneck. The second is cold standby transfer: every month, the cold backup data is transferred to this disk, then taken to my mom's old Synology for comparison. Outside the remote rsync, there's an extra leg, which is much more convenient than carrying a machine around.

There are a few things I absolutely refused to let it do. original catalog photo library remains on the pool's Btrfs, with snapshots and recycle bins being lifelines; qBittorrent's temporary download zone is still on the old SSD, downloads are low-write, high-frequency, and stacking and scraping is pure torture. the directory planning of the downloader's is still the same; None of the Docker containers were pointed at the USB drives—when the machine rebooted, the USB drive mounted a bit slower than the internal drive, and the container stuck on it. If it booted on and it would be a bit annoying, it would be a real headache.

also take note of it. The 3.5-inch enclosure and old drive are all ready-made in the drawer, meaning you can expand to 4TB at zero cost; Even if you buy a brand-new one, a box priced around a hundred yuan with a 4T CMR drive costs less than a NAS drive of the same capacity, and is an order of magnitude cheaper than replacing a four-drive machine. Cheap elasticity—that's exactly what it says.

Taking the Matter: Who Should Penetrate, Who Should Not Mess With

Wrap up with a clear order: first think about what to put on top, and if you lose what you put in, will it hurt? Then select the box with power and the CMR drive; Format left on NTFS to leave a backup plan; Plug it in and hang it as a shared directory for storage; Important items remain in the pool, and backups are essential. USB drives are cheap elastic, not cheap cartridges. Once you understand this, they're quite useful.