I am trying to use two WD USB attached HDDs I have laying around and do a node in Windows 10.
I attached the two WD USB drives to the computer and disk manager can see them.
I am able to format them as individual partitions BUT I want to strip them within Windows 10 to make them one larger disk for the node.
Windows keeps giving me an error that external drives can’t be used for stripping.
I have read many articles about trying to use BootIT to change the bit, and changing the way it is safely disconnected etc to try and get Windows to allow it but nothing has seemed to work…
Is there anyone out there that has used multiple USB HDD in Windows and combined them for one node?
install docker and create two storage nodes in docker one for each hdd, that way if one drive should fail then it won’t take the other storagenode down with it…
there is no advantage to striping the drives, and yes windows will not allow you to do such things on removable drives, which usb drives are counted as… this security feature can be disabled, but you really shouldn’t want to… its there because its a bad idea and will most likely only cause you grief.
when using multiple drives with out raid like redundancy, then you are only increasing your points of failure, and single hdd’s and usb isn’t exactly highly reliable in the first place.
also a stripe / raid 0 will only give you iops worth of one hdd, just like any raid array will be limited to the iops of the slowest drive in the raid, storj is fairly heavy on the iops.
and thus having two nodes will make the data distributed across both nodes and thus double the iops of your storj setup, which is a great advantage for your overall performance.
infact some people created additional nodes just because their hdd’s aren’t performing well enough
internal is much preferred, but you still shouldn’t stripe them…
but if you can avoid using usb, then it might be a good idea…
usb problems isn’t a problem for everybody, but for some they simply cannot keep their nodes working on their usb setup… ofc in other case it runs just fine…
remember to turn off power management on the hdd’s, tho it’s usually not a big problem, it’s often a problem people run into.
and if you want to ensure low latency and long life of the drives you should also disable their internal power management, i forget what windows tool you can do that with… i’ve been using hdparm on linux
-255 is APM OFF in hdparm… but not sure if other tools use those definitions, but they might since it’s basically changes on the hdd’s internal OS, forgot the parameter for APM tho, and doubt thats the same anyways…
so without stripping how do I make 2 disks visible by a single node as one?
I don’t want to run 2 nodes on the same device.
Totally agree all of this is simpler in Linux but this machine isn’t mine and I am trying to set it up simplest way possible so I don’t have to educate the user on complicated terms
you could make them into a mirror lol… that would sure make it very stable… there really isn’t a good way to connect two drives for one node…
mainly it comes down to that if you got two drives and a cable gets lose, a disk goes bad, or if a power cable gets lose, then the entire node fails, but yeah i can see the problem…
the problem with setting up a mirror is ofc that it halves the capacity… so not really better than one drive in that aspect, but if a cable falls out or a disk fails in 6 months then the node won’t die …
i suppose you could do a span, that doesn’t stripe across the drives, but should load balance… its the better of the options… even if it still has the whole doubled odds of failure, and many nodes fail…
so i would recommend doing a mirror or two nodes in docker…
and for your end user i guess both solutions sucks a bit… a span could work… but i cannot recommend it.
Longer story summarized. I was on voskcointalk.com and commented on a post about Filecoin and said my experience with Storj is much better and doesn’t require such high specs.
Another user reached out directly and said he wants to get into Storj so I pointed him to all the docs, and forum, and a YouTube video but he got stick with this issue. So I tried to find a way in Windows and came to the same conclusions you did but when talking to him he said he has hardware skills but no software so walking him through docker or LVM or others doesn’t seem like an option. (Plus I have seen people having issues for Docker for Windows and not sure he would be up for those)
He said clearly that he understands the risks of stripping and doesn’t want to loose TBs by mirror or any redundancy he just wants to take the two drives and make them one and turn on a node.
So at this point I would recommend he make them internal drives and either strip or span so he gets the TB size he wants and a single node for simplicity
get him on to the forum, and then let the crowd mind take care of it
i would just do a mirror setup… then it’s much less likely he will kill it…
are they big hdd’s ? because if its like 2x 2 tb then it’s basically just a test to see if it’s something he finds interesting… and less issues would be advantageous, and then there is only one node
but yeah i would get him on the forum, you can ofc still help him, but people here are also pretty good at getting people guided in the right direction and knowing stuff like router setup…
sometimes there are very nation specific things, in regard to port forwarding…
sadly setting up storj isn’t to simple, because there are a lot of things that come into play long term, because most computers aren’t really setup for server like tasks.
so if he cannot forward the ports in his router, then the disk thing is irrelevant… ofc he might not even have access to a router, not everybody does, even tho it’s generally the most popular solution.
but there are ofc some network where the router is far away from the actual users.
Every time I reply I say “in the forum” so maybe some day he will join…
He has 2 x 8TB drives and said he would either start with one and see what happens or crack them open.
When we talked about the port he said he will have to call the ISP to open the port so at least he knows that. I told him to get everything ready before he even starts looking at Storj directly like the HDDs, port, DDNS, uptime robot, etc. then when everything is ready watch Will’s YouTube video and read the WIndows docs and forum. He got stuck on HDD steps so hopefully he will be able to progress and we will have a new node.
Hi can you explain how to disable that security feaure?
I haven’t found out any guides on how to do it.
I know it’s not the most reliable way to make raid but that’s my only option so i’m 100% aware of what could happen.
Thanks that would really be helpful!
not sure, that i would call (raid0 / striping) a “raid”…
there is no Redundancy… so more like an AID… 1 AID, first AID… because thats what you will… well ill just leave that there…
maybe something like this… the problem to getting these kind of features is that removable drives, is not allowed for operating systems, raids and whatever else which would be a terrible idea to setup on them.
how to remove it exactly i’m not sure of… but pretty sure i’ve seen it mentioned somewhere…
the reason it’s not able to by default is that it is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea…
might let you make a mirror lol
maybe this link is better
don’t kid yourself, this is a terrible idea… just don’t
but i will enable you… muahaha on the off chance that you do know what you are doing…
