Hi Everyone,
I've been experimenting with a NUC D54250WYK for a few weeks now with the intention of setting up a
low-power home server. I've given it 16GB of RAM, a 60GB mSATA drive for the operating system and
4 USB 3.0 drives for storage. (2.5" USB3.0 WD elements drives, power via USB (225mA), auto-spin-down
when idle - which is fine for my requirements)
I've installed FreeBSD 10 and I'm using ZFS with RAIDZ2 on the 4 USB drives, and everything seems to
work... almost.
Every 7-10 days one or more of the drives either reports write errors, or completely disconnects itself
(i.e. is no longer visible to the OS). ZFS handles the errors gracefully and I can get the drive(s) back by
physically disconnecting them and re-connecting them again, but this kind of problem makes it impossible
to rely on this machine "just running in the background".
I don't have enough statistics to isolate individual drives or ports which might be causing the problems
- so far it seems to randomly affect 1-2 drives at a random point in time.
The OS is NOT configured to sleep at all - except for the drives going idle (handled by the drive firmware)
Are the NUC's USB ports designed for permanent use? Am I going beyond the NUC's specifications?
Are there any tricks for increasing the reliability of USB devices for long-term use?
(I've tried changing the drive's power settings for example, but still get the same behaviour)
Could I expect better results from another drive manufacturer or is this typical USB behaviour?
If so, what should I be looking for?
Is this a general problem with external drives? Is this even a feasible concept?
Thanks in advance,
Steve
PS: I also had the "D34010WYK does neither boot from USB 3.0 nor boots with plugged USB 3.0 drive" issue (https://communities.intel.com/thread/46549) and although I"m locked out of the BIOS at the moment,
the OS itself seems to be running quite stably now.