Hi everyone! I recently moved my services from a Hetzner VPS to an OrangePi Zero 3 and I was wondering what options do I have storage-wise? How could I plug the most HDDs possible on this thing? Does anyone have a successful setup that might want to share?
You bought a device with just one single USB 2.0 port and ask for the ideal storage option?
I could be wrong, but you’re probably limited to one external HDD (~20 TB) and one micro SD card (1 TB).
My concerns with using external storage on a Pi is backup.
Drives fail, externals even more so.
I suppose you could add a powered USB hub. But you’d really want a backup/replication plan to something like Backblaze B2, etc.
Quick question about the hubs. I saw some with 5+ ports. Using USB 2.0 I know I’ll have some limitations on speed, but could I for instance, plug 5 HDDs and this speed would be evenly divided among then (given a moment where they all would get written at the same time)? If only 1 HDD is being written, would it get this full speed? Is this math that simple or are there more things that I’m not considering?
devices on the hub share the total bandwidth to/from the host system’s usb port. data going between drives on the same hub has to travel to the host then back again.
so: transferring files to/from a single drive will go ‘full speed’, transferring files between two drives on that hub will run at about half speed, accessing data on all the drives on that hub at the same time (such as syncing a snapraid array built on externals all connected to that hub) will be painfully and brutally slow.