I have an 11th gen Framework mainboard which I would like to repurpose as a server. Unfortunately, (unless I do some super janky stuff) I can only connect 1 drive to it over M.2 and any additional ones must be over USB.
I am thinking of just using some portable hard drives and plugging them in over USB. I plan to RAID1 them and use them as boot drives and data storage, and use the M.2 slot for something unrelated.
In your experiences, is USB reliable enough nowadays to run a RAID array for a server like this? If it is, does it depend on the specific drive used?
In my experience, noooooo.
I’ve had too many momentary disconnects with USB devices to trust that on a 24/7 server.
An early server I built had a large USB backup drive for a RAID5 array and every month there was usually something that went wrong.
Agreed. You’re at the mercy of your USB controllers as well as southbridge in that case.
You’re adding more things that can go wrong.
Generally HBA/RAID cards are usually built for enterprise rather than consumer so they’re usually more reliable as well.
Today’s CPUs usually expose some USB connections directly. Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs expose 4 USB 3.2 Gen 2 directly on their on-package I/O die for example. So if you connect your USB drives directly to the ports your mainboard connects directly to the CPU, the chipset (“southbridge”) and any third-party USB controllers are out of the equation.
This is just information, I’m not advising to use USB for fixed storage.
I’ve been doing USB with raid on several servers for 10 years. No random disconnects.
Because I have a total of 28 drives and it works really well and is flexible.
12 of them are in a Synology though
Well, nothing is reliable over USB type A. If you don’t want to DIY you can get a USB JBOD with type-c like this one or that one or this cheaper one. They’ll get the job done for a price. :)
However, there are easy ways to get reliable SATA ports from m2 slots that your framework has. NVME to 6 SATA ports: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004263885851.html
To power the disks you can use ANY standard ATX power supply (get something brand-gold second hand for 20$). To make sure the PSU stays ON, just plug a wire between the green and any black wire.
Another option for power is to get a cheap 12V power supply and a step down DC/DC to provide 5V. If you don’t have it a SATA cable like this is helpful. Simply cut the white plug and attach the red cable (5v) to the output of the DC/DC and the yellow one (12V) directly to the power supply.
There’s also these dual output power supplies that you can regulate to 12v+5v but frankly I would just go for the option above as it will be safer.
Make sure you check every voltage and polarity before plugging anything into your power supply!!
I do not recommend it. I ran two USB hard drives for over a year in BTRFS RAID1, and I had millions of errors repaired every month when I scrubbed it.
There should be an m.2 port for the wifi chip,you can buy sata expansion cards there, sthg like this:
Search for “m.2 key e sata”. Use wired net on a usb dongle, if it doesn’t have an ethernet port
Any way to power the drives if you don’t have any more free power cables? Just have to buy a new PSU?
I’ve been running some external drives on my server for about a year now. In my experience, hard drives with an external power supply suffer less from random disconnects. The specific PC also makes quite a large difference in reliability. My server is just a regular desktop and has very little problem staying connected and powering my 3 external drives. My seedbox is an old laptop, and has been having almost constant problems with random disconnects and power issues. Maybe test how well your framework does with some external drives before committing to the plan?
