Hi, I know there have been a few topics relating to storage expansion, but I’d like some additional information and clarification. I currently have a Syncloud N with two drives, the internal M.2 and an ssd installed with the internal SATA connector (this is an external drive according to Syncloud), I would like to expand this storage further with usb drive/s.
First question, can I use both the “external” SATA drive and the new USB drive/s at the same time or will I have to choose?
Second question, I know Syncloud uses RAID 1/RAID 10 for multiple drives, so I assume mismatched drives will be limited to the capacity of the smaller drive, is this correct?
Third question, should external drives always be btrfs or can ext4 drives be used with the same RAID functionality within Syncloud?
Finally, is there any update for advice on cloning disks or is dd still the recommend solution?
Sorry for the longer post and thanks in advance for clarification
First question, can I use both the “external” SATA drive and the new USB drive/s at the same time or will I have to choose?
I think technically nothing stops you from doing it, but why complicate things, this will only bring problems. You need to have a good resaon to do it Why not buy bigger SATA disks?
Second question, I know Syncloud uses RAID 1/RAID 10 for multiple drives, so I assume mismatched drives will be limited to the capacity of the smaller drive, is this correct?
Yes, I have a test device with 100g + 1000g and I can see only 100 as I remember
Third question, should external drives always be btrfs or can ext4 drives be used with the same RAID functionality within Syncloud?
This was done for simplicity (one of the main goals of Syncloud).
I know some people use mdadm on top of ext4 to create array manually and then activate it in Syncloud which was the only way to use multiple disks before simplified btrfs and is still supported.
Thanks for the reply and happy holidays! I have two goals for my upgrade, expand storage and add redundancy. With this device (Syncloud N) I don’t think I can add a second SATA disk, unless I’m missing something. I think this means I will go the route of 2 USB disks, but ultimately I think I need to find another solution long term. My current thoughts are building a machine with more storage options or going the route of offloading storage to a network drive if I can get it to play nicely with Syncloud.
