We are a company in the television industry and therefore operate end systems at various locations worldwide. We would like to implement a workflow where we use a QNAP as local storage with a large RAID system and hard drives defined as individual disks. We would like to be able to hot-swap these drives into a Linux Debian system and vice versa.
This is not a problem for external hard drives on the QNAP, but we also need this functionality for the internal hard drives connected to the backplane.
Under QTS (not HERO), the hard drives can be defined as individual hard drives, but no format (ext4 or similar) can be specified.
When connecting this hard drive to a Debian system, five partitions are displayed. One of them, the relevant one, is displayed as DRBD/LVM and therefore cannot be easily mounted. Is there a way to treat the internal hard drives like external hard drives to make them more compatible with our Linux systems? Perhaps via the command line?
We considered this solution, but it was too small for the data we wanted to send. To be precise, we need around 50TB per hard drive. That’s why we equipped the QNAPs with U.2/U.3 drives.
Hi sb_koeln
I have never heard of anyone doing what you are trying to do. In the professional video industry, there have been countless network attached shared storage systems for decades - from companies like AVID Nexis, Studio Network Solutions, Quantum, Facilis, Editshare, GB Labs, Dynamic Drive Pool, OWC Jellyfish, not to mention QNAP and Synology. NO ONE allows you to just pop out drives, like a cheap drive dock, and move them from system to system. None of these systems are drive docks. And you are talking about need 50 TB per hard drive - drives this size have never existed until about 2 years ago - and they only come from companies like Solidigm and Phison Pascari, and they are INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE. A single Solidigm 60 TB U.2 NVMe drive is about $6500 for ONE drive. So the bottom line here - is, that you are not going to get what you want - from any manufacturer.
Bob Zelin