RAID can be used for multiple HDDs that are connected by separate connections. Theoritically, the same should apply to HDD bays. Are there any or is it possible, with them being connected to one usb connection, to separate the connection to several usb ports to maximize speed?
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With USB, you would need a hub to manage the traffic. USB 3.0 speed is roughly comparable to SATA, so sharing a single connection, even with USB 3.0, would not have the bandwidth to keep up with what the drives are capable of.– fixer1234Jan 3, 2015 at 8:31
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2 Answers
Your question is not very clear (with respect of your OS or what you are trying to do). You can RAID HDD's over USB under Linux using software raid (MDADM)
I would imagine you would not generally want to RAID drives using USB2 or slower because performance will suck rocks. Theoretically USB3 should work fine, but as you are abstracting away from the SATA (or whatever) Interface they are unlikely to perform quite as well.
Having each device on its own USB3 port would give you better performance then having them go through a hub sharing a single USB port as there is more available to each device that way.
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For HDD bays, there is usually one USB connection. I would like to keep the HDDs in the bay for it has a power adapter and it would avoid power supply issues via USB. Is it possible to split the single USB connection so it could connect through multiple ports?– ShadowJan 3, 2015 at 8:42
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What do you mean by HDD bays ? What device are you referring to - and does it have built in RAID capabilities ? ( many/most multi hdd drive NAS boxes will automatically do RAID and present it as a single drive to another computer) If you are talking about a multiple disk solution which does not some kind of NAS A single USB connection can go through multiple ports using a hub but as @fixer1234 said it will be a lot slower.– davidgoJan 3, 2015 at 9:09
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I am referring to Mediasonic ProBox HF2-SU3S2. There is one with RAID capabilities. Since multiple ports isn't an option as from yours and @fixer1234's answers, is there a way to increase the speed of the HDD bay if it was to hit the speed limit of its USB3 or eSATA connection?– ShadowJan 3, 2015 at 9:49
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Ahh, now I understand what you are trying to ask - which is, in fact the opposite of what you did ask ! The fastest way to connect this device up to your PC is via the ESATA connection. If you are putting hard drives in this (as opposed to SSD's) you will saturate the throughput of both disk drives way before the ESATA connection. (ESATA6 can support about 600 megabyte/sec transfer, the fastest hard drives sustain less then 200 megabytes/sec).– davidgoJan 3, 2015 at 19:35
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Let's say SDDs were used then. Is there a way to get past the speed limit of eSATA?– ShadowJan 4, 2015 at 4:11
We use the Addonics 3 bay box which has 4 sata inputs, three of which go to the 3 bays, the fourth is spare... [addonics product description] I'm not pushing this product, there are probably many others as well.
