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?

  • Possibly linuxEnglish
    2•6 months ago

    I have minipc that only has one drive slot. I use an external thunderbolt enclosure with a eNVM drive in it

    It works ok for me but don’t expect great performance and reliability.