I have an 11th gen Framework mainboard which I would like to repurpose as a server. Unfortunately, (unless I do some super janky stuff) I can only connect 1 drive to it over M.2 and any additional ones must be over USB.
I am thinking of just using some portable hard drives and plugging them in over USB. I plan to RAID1 them and use them as boot drives and data storage, and use the M.2 slot for something unrelated.
In your experiences, is USB reliable enough nowadays to run a RAID array for a server like this? If it is, does it depend on the specific drive used?
No. USB is not designed to be reliable. It’s designed to be plug and play. Don’t plug and play with your data.
That sentence does not make any sense whatsoever. SATA and SAS are hot pluggable as well.
Plug and play means you don’t have to fiddle with drivers or IRQs or whatever.
Plug and play alone is not the reason. Nvme is plug and play.