I was wondering if I could use an external hard drive and connect it through the USB port that the router has, could it be done or does it need to be supported by a computer with a network card.
If your router is a server capable of running the Storj software or docker, it is possible
If your router ist just some router, which I assume in that case, it is not possible
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most routers have usb ports, usually for some streaming stuff… in theory any router able to do that should be powerful enough… the question then becomes if the operating system allows it or can be reinstalled/ replaced.
and if you want to risk the trouble and sink the time into actually converting a 75$ piece of hardware into another 75$ piece of hardware to save 75$ and a little power …
doubt it would be worth the effort, but it’s its easy sure… but unlikely… most likely just for storage for a built in streaming server… might be to do iscsi… or something.
but networked storage isn’t very good for storj and usb solution can also be problematic… so … i don’t think it makes sense to worry about it…
not neccessarily true… a simple streaming from an smb server running on the router is not very demanding. Most routers can do that but don’t even have 100MB of RAM left. The rather powerful FRITZ!Box 7590 has a total of 512MB of RAM, almost half of it is used without any SMB services etc. So in this case there would actually be enough RAM to run a node but not sure if the process would like it. You’d certainly need to “crack” the OS first, but I never looked into that.
The OP however doesn’t say if he just wants to use the HDD on the router and run the node on a different device or run the node on the router itself.
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sure that might be right… if ram is the limitation… ofc with less than a few hundred MB of ram it’s certainly not going to work for long…
but i do wonder if one can totally count on the cpu to be powerful enough… maybe at first for sure, but as nodes grow older their utilization will keep going up… i know my 14.6TB node does tend to use a fair bit of resources from time to time.
maybe it could do with less… than it takes at its peaks and just stretch it over longer periods, but i wouldn’t completely be certain that the cpu will be able to keep up… atleast with large nodes…
rung a 2TB well that will run on most likely anything… run a 20TB one and that may require atleast 10 times more lets say and really stuff doesn’t scale like that… computer slowdown is rarely linear in my experience… ofc in some cases, but more often it isn’t.
I use an HDD by USB because it have 4 TB . Is this a problem?
USB is kinda hit and miss… some have no trouble at all… but USB is designed to be easy for connect, disconnect and reconnect… so this makes it a bit more unstable by design, but i do suspect many of these issues are down to people using the same USB controller for other stuff which then ends up affecting their nodes.
but there certainly can be issues with the USB stability, due to certain features also… like power management… and these might not turn up before periods of low activity… like now…
if you are using USB, then i would recommend keeping a good eye on it for a while see how it behaves, if it works for a 3 months period and isn’t unstable i doubt that will change unless if the environment changes it…
by environment changing it, i mean… cars / trucks driving by, people walking by or other such vibrations, people accessing or changing cabling nearby, even temperature changes can in some rare cases, aside from that power stability ofc also comes into play…
Some people have been running USB setups for years without issue.
high activity can also cause a external USB HDD to overheat, mainly because they are rarely designed for 24/7 operation.
if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it 
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np with the temperature, it’s ok I use Crystaldisck
Are you planning on running a node on the router itself? If so you will need to find the specs to the router and make sure it is able to use SSH if you can, You can run the binary file on it directly that has already been proven by another user. So if it has enough ram it could easily run it.
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Well, I assume that:
he wants to know if you can run the storjnode software on his router without another device (“computer” or the likes)