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Attaching multiple HD's to external USB hub? RRS feed

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    As my WHS is running out of USB ports I was considering adding an external USB hub with 4 ports and its own power supply to attach several external HD’s in their external cases featuring USB connections.

     

    Can WHS identify the individual HD’s attached to this external USB hub?

     

    Thanks a lot for the information!

     

    Sunday, April 25, 2010 12:56 PM

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    Hi,
    USB disks in the storage pool are already a difficulty on their own - splitting those more up by a hub adds to potential causes of trouble. In the past users have experienced issues like disks not longer recognized as members of the storage pool, which could have been caused by the specifics of the enclosure, cable quality etc. Also with an increasing amount of cabling the risk of an accident caused by a human is increasing (pulled cable, falling down disk stack ...), and do not forget, that the bandwidth of USB 2.0 is shared between all these attached drives.

    I don't know, what you have for a home server (OEM or self built), but you could try to exchange the internal disks for larger ones one by one or get a new case with more chances to attach internal drives.

    Best greetings from Germany
    Olaf

    Sunday, April 25, 2010 8:32 PM
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    Connecting external storage through a hub is not supported, and strongly discouraged. USB shares bandwidth among all the devices connected to a root hub (usually on the motherboard), and there are normally two USB ports on a root hub. So when you connect an external hub and several drives to that, you're really sharing one USB connection among however many drives are connected to the root hub. That means each drive is receiving a fraction of the bandwidth available.

    That said, usually it works adequately, as long as you don't need to stream media and you're willing to accept that backups run rather slowly.

    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Sunday, April 25, 2010 10:03 PM
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    Do you have any other connectivity other than USB? Say eSata, internal PCI ports, internal SATA/PATA even firewire (remember firewire can be daisy chained)?
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    Monday, April 26, 2010 9:09 AM