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?
In my experience, noooooo.
I’ve had too many momentary disconnects with USB devices to trust that on a 24/7 server.
An early server I built had a large USB backup drive for a RAID5 array and every month there was usually something that went wrong.
You are quite likely to regret going down this route. Should do what you have to to get the drives properly connected.
