USB3.0 RAID 1 enclosure that can be connected to my new router

Question

I have wanted to set up a NAS for ages. I recently moved house and had to buy a new fibre modem/router. It has two USB 3.0 ports, and it'll be switched on all the time, so I figured it might be a low cost, low power way to get my NAS going.

I want my NAS to be RAID 1, so I was looking at enclosures like the ones suggested here and here. However, I'm a bit nervous about compatibility issues between the USB enclosure and the router. Do devices like these always work nicely together these days?

If I were plugging the enclosure into my PC, then I would feel confident that I could sort out any driver issues. But with the router's OS, I pretty much have to hope it just works, else I'm stuffed.

Thanks for any tips or suggestions!

Answer 1

Do devices like these always work nicely together these days?

This depends on the dual-bay enclosure that you buy, but most of them appear to the computer as a USB hub with either one or two USB storage class devices attached to it.

With the enclosure that I have used before (Mediasonic ProRaid), there is a physical switch to select how the disks are used. When it is in RAID 0 or 1 mode, the PC can only see one drive which is the virtual disk created by the RAID. I have tested this enclosure with multiple operating systems and it seems to work as a plug & play USB drive, like any other USB hard drive or stick would.

Since your router does support USB storage, I expect that most USB RAID 1 enclosures will be detected by the router as a single drive.