The NAS was plugged into a removable hard drive as a storage disk, and three months later it encountered three pitfalls: the power supply format was disconnected.

The N100 dual-bay Feiniu at home had both ports fully plugged in last year.: 4T cool wolf outfit photos and documentaries, a 500G old solid state dedicated to feeding qBittorrent. At the beginning of the year, I cleared out more than 400 G's in the pond, but I couldn't keep up with the documentary, and the number dropped season by season. As of last month, there were only about 20 G's left. Don’t even think about adding disk slots. The chassis only has two slots. The money to replace it with a four-bay machine is enough to buy four more disks. The account that saved money on disk space that year Now I've made up for it all. I dug through the drawer and found two mobile hard drives.: The 2.5-inch Seagate 1T comes with a 3.5-inch Western Digital 4T with a hard drive box with power supply. Both of them plugged in and hung out for three months now. Tell the truth.

Make it clear first: It can be plugged in and recognized, but the plug-in warehouse and the storage pool are two different things.

Many people think that when a mobile hard disk is plugged in, the capacity will automatically be added to the NAS pool. No. Synology and Feiniu have the same temper. The disk plugged into the USB port can never enter the storage space. It is an independent external device.: Synology saw it in external devices and File Station, and Feiniu saw it in the external storage of file management. If you want to share it with your family, you have to mount it as a shared directory.

This means three things. First, the snapshots, recycle bin, and fine-grained permissions in the pool have nothing to do with it. Once a file is deleted, it is deleted. Those ways to rescue were deleted by mistake The external disk is greatly reduced, and the format is mostly NTFS that does not take snapshots. Second, it does not participate in RAID, there is no redundancy at all, and if it breaks, it is broken. Third, directories such as photo album libraries and Docker need to be written into the storage space, and do not point them to the USB disk. Once the firmware is upgraded, they will not be able to find their home.

Therefore, the positioning must be corrected first.: Plugging the mobile hard disk into the NAS is just to find a warehouse outside the hospital where you can put it in and take it out, nothing more. If you really want to expand your pool, the right way is to switch to a larger market and migrate. The article about changing plates and moving I wrote the whole process.

There is another action that is easily overlooked: Before unplugging the disk, click Uninstall in the background, which is the same as safely ejecting the USB disk on the computer. One time I was in a hurry and unplugged the backup task before it was finished. The next time I mounted NTFS, it took me about ten minutes to repair the directory before it could be restored. The format with log is better than exFAT in this regard and can be repaired well, but you have to give it time to repair.

Three kinds of fortunes: The account of power supply is the easiest to overturn.

My two games have completely different destinies, and the difference lies in the electricity.

The 3.5-inch Western Digital hard drive box comes with a 12V power supply, which is stable when plugged in. After three months of use, SMB dragging large files read 138MB/s and wrote 121MB/s. This number is better than I thought: The Gigabit network port itself is only about 110MB/s, which means that the USB port is not the bottleneck at all. The 5Gbps theoretical bandwidth of 3.0 is more than enough for a mechanical disk. Downloads, backups, and TV pulls were all done without interruption.

The 2.5-inch Seagate naked plug is not so decent. It was fine for the first two days, but on the third day the download task wiped it out in the early morning. A string of USB resets appeared in dmesg, and the disk disappeared from the system and came back on its own. The root is supplying power: The USB3.0 standard only provides 900mA per port, and the motor of a 2.5-inch mechanical disk has to rush up to 1A when it is started. Normally it runs at a constant speed, but when it wakes up from sleep, or when writing to a disk, the motor takes a breather, and the voltage drops off with a flicker. When the same disk is plugged into the rear port of the computer, it works perfectly. The motherboard has a large power supply margin and no jitter.

I really want to hang up the 2.5-inch disk for a long time, there are three ways: It has an independent power supply hard drive box, and a Y-shaped double-ended cable connects to the two ports. If it doesn't work, don't hang up, just plug and unplug it. My old laptop was converted into an experimental NAS, and it finally stopped after I replaced it with an easy drive cable with a 12V power supply. That article The whole process is memorized.

Format this multiple choice question: Windows, NAS, and TV can only please two.

Whether the disk is recognized or not depends on the format. The most common mistake here is to "convert it to ext4" - NAS is comfortable and has the best performance, but from now on, any Windows computer that inserts this disk will have to install third-party software to read it, which can be very annoying in an emergency.

Synology DSM7's support list for external disks includes Btrfs, ext4, FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, etc. To read exFAT for certain firmware, you must first go to the package center to install the free exFAT package. Feiniu is more worry-free. After version 0.9.2, NTFS, exFAT, and FAT32 disks can be plugged in and read directly without formatting. I have taken advantage of this bonus.

exFAT seems to be the most perfect, and is recognized by Windows, Mac, and TV. However, it has no logs and is most afraid of being powered off in the middle of writing. The disks attached to the NAS are read and written every day, so power outage is not a small possibility in the NAS industry. So I keep both disks in NTFS.: Writing is slower than ext4, and the monthly incremental backup is not noticeable at all. In exchange, this disk can be unplugged and inserted into any computer at any time for emergency purposes.

Slow speed and disconnection: Writing a large document on a tiled plate exposes the secret

There is still a big hole in performance: Most of the 2.5-inch mobile hard drives on the market are tiled drives. My Seagate is like this - I can write more than 80GB of documentary folders in it, and the first 30GB can run 90MB/s, which looks pretty beautiful. ； Once the built-in cache of the shingled disk is finished writing, the speed drops to 20 or 30 MB, and the last 10 GB is like squeezing out toothpaste. When the warehouse disk is written once and read many times, it is no problem. If the target disk is written every day, the slowdown will be enough for you.

How to tell? Copy a large file and watch the second half of the process. It's fast at first and slow at the end. It's basically like tiles. Before buying, search the model number and add SMR to check for more stability. The selection article It has been said that Western Digital did not mark the shingles in 2020 and was scolded. The right way around it is to install CMR disks such as CoolWolf and Galaxy in the 3.5-inch hard disk box yourself, and spend dozens of yuan more to buy a reliable one.

Troubleshooting dropped calls is also simple. If the disk disappears, don't pull it out yet. SSH in and type dmesg to see the last few dozen lines. If there are words such as usb reset timeout and device disconnection and reconnection, it is basically a problem of power supply or line contact. Change the line, change the port, and add power supply in three steps. If you are suspicious of the disk itself, remember to add the -d sat parameter for SMART testing. The article on new disk testing Mentioned the USB bridge. In addition, the automatic hibernation of USB disks is more aggressive than that of built-in disks, and wake-up failures are a common problem. The disk in the pool secretly writes to the disk without sleeping It's just the opposite problem, one can't sleep and the other can't wake up.

My usage: Add cold backup to the overflow warehouse to prevent it from getting involved in the pool.

After using it for three months, I assigned two tasks to the USB disk, and both of them did a good job.

The first one is the overflow bin. The 4T block is hung in the shared directory as an archive. After downloading and watching the documentary, move it in, and the pool will immediately make room. The TV will directly point to this directory to play, which is no different from using the files in the pool. Anyway, the Gigabit network port is the bottleneck. The second one is cold standby transfer: For monthly cold backup, I first import the data to this disk and take it to my mother’s old Qunhui to check it again. The remote set of rsync Having an extra leg is much more convenient than running while holding a machine.

There were a few things I decided not to let it do. photo gallery The original directory remains on the Btrfs of the pool, and the snapshot and recycle bin are the lifeblood. ； The download temporary area of ​​qBittorrent is still on the old solid state. The download is small and high-frequency. It is pure torture to tile the disk. Download machine article The directory layout remains as usual ； None of the Docker containers are pointed to the USB disk - when the machine restarts, the USB disk is mounted half a beat slower than the built-in disk. The container rests on it and starts automatically every minute after booting.

Keep an account by the way. This set of 3.5-inch hard disk enclosures and old disks are all ready-made in the drawer, which is equivalent to an expansion of 4T at zero cost. ； Even if you buy it brand new, a 4T CMR disk in a hundred-yuan box is only dozens of yuan more expensive than a NAS disk of the same capacity, and an order of magnitude cheaper than a four-bay machine. Cheap elasticity, that's what I'm talking about.

Take your seat: Who should step in and who should not be bothered?

Give an order at the end: Think clearly about what to put on it first. Do you feel bad if you lose what you put? ； Then choose a box with power supply and CMR disk ； The format remains in NTFS, leaving a way out for yourself. ； Plug and hang it into a shared directory for use as a warehouse ； Important things are still left in the pool, and a backup copy is indispensable. USB disks are cheap and flexible, not cheap pools. If you understand this, they are very useful.