Is there an advantage to using the primary drive over adding a second with the external storage app?

🚧 Installation
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1

More or less what is says in the subject. I was thinking about adding another drive to my pi instance, but would I be better off just going for a larger drive and keeping it on one storage device?

2

I think you can only configure one primary and only in addition external.
external has got disadvantages. Please compare primary vs. external for solve your question.

3

Slightly more info would be helpful.
Are you running NCP from the SD and have a USB drive attached for storage?
If that is the setup, adding a secondary drive just makes it complicated and you will run into power issues, as the Pi will not be able to provide stable power to two drives.

If you run NCP from a USB drive and don’t use a SD card, you might benefit from adding a secondary (larger) drive for storage. But again, you will run into power issues and make things complicated to setup. Additionally you will not be able to use the primary drive for data storage, so you probably waste lots of GB’s of storage.

The only useful setups with two drives I can think of are:

  • NCP from SD card & two (Externally powered) drives as RAID (more storage, faster or more desaster proof)
  • NCP from SD card or USB Drice with a secondary USB drive as Backup Drive, again the USB drive(s) should get external power.
4

The latter, but I wasn’t aware of the power issues. That pretty much tells me what I need to know, thanks!

5

You can mount multiple drives via fstab without issue. Best to skip external storage entirely since it is slower. My longtime setup has been:

  • emmc (boot)
  • external disk mounted via fstab (data directory as docker volume)
  • external disk for backups over network.

Thanks to usb boot support on Pi’s for about a year now you don’t even need a slow SD card. Just go for:

  • usb3 drive, ideally with an SSD.
  • second drive for ncp automated backups.
  • network attached storage for additional backups or data storage.
6

Yes. But their is only one data dir.
'datadirectory' => '/var/www/nextcloud/data',
I think then you must mount each user separately after creating the user in nextcloud.

How would you do that with, say, 100 users and 10 different directories?
Or do I have a thinking error?

7

Use whatever setup you prefer and define it as the data dir for Nextcloud. :+1:

8

A note on power issues:

Try something like the “LogiLink UA0115” case.
It has two USB cables, one USB3 for data and one USB for power only.

If you plug in the USB3 to the Pi’s USB3 port and the USB for power to the Pi’s USB2 port, it seems to solve the power issue.

I did not try this with two drives though.