Use any DAS over USB with FlashStor Gen 2 instead of just AS6004U

[brando56894]

I bought a 12 bay FlashStor Gen 2 because I have a bunch of NVME drives, and I live in an apartment. I was tired of having increasingly big servers in such a small(ish) space without anywhere to hide them away (I was using a 24 bay 4U case previously...it was in my bedroom under my TV).

I have 8x 8 TB HDDs and 7x 18 TB HDDs that I didn't want to get rid of so I bought a cheap 8 bay USB 3.2 DAS for the 18 TBs assuming it would work without issue with the FlashStor since the DAS is a "dumb" system...only to discover that ADM5 thinks it's a AS6004U and only shows 4 drives...none of which are actually usable in the interface. I can see them via the CLI and was able to build a RAID array using them, but there's no way to get them to persist and mount after a reboot. I currently have the DAS attached to a Raspberry Pi 5 and have it shared out over Samba...but it's not really a solution since it doesn't mount quickly enough for my Docker containers to make use of it, so I have to manually restart them each time when the share becomes available. I also find it a bit ridiculous that mounting an NFS export isn't an option, you can only use the FlashStor as an NFS server. I built a RAID10, FAR array using the Pi and then plugged it into the FlashStor and attempted to start the array...but mdadm said that it couldn't find a valid superblock on the first drive, fdisk thinks it's an EFI partition, but parted shows that it's a RAID member drive. I plugged it back into the Pi and it started and mounted without issue.

I already paid $1300 for the 12 bay version of the FlashStor and it's absolutely ridiculous that Asustor expects users to pay an additional $500-$600 just to connect 4 HDDs over USB. I don't need the extra features that linking the two would provide, so it's like shelling out hundreds of dollars more for less benefit (half the storage capacity and unneeded features). This is vendor lock-in at it's finest, even though Asustor claims that it's "an open system"

[Parsec]

I'm with you. Would be nice if there was support for not only multiple external drives but also for a DAS. I have an AS5404T and was thinking of getting more drives. Buying the AS5004U expansion unit is a costly way to do it. Here in Aus the AS5004U is $499 and interestingly the Drivestor 2 Pro 4 bay NAS is $499. So an expansion unit is the same cost as a complete new NAS! They need to have a better solution, perhaps add on software or something.