I have a set of external disks I use for backup purposes for my Plex box. In their next to second final state, where I setup something to turn them on and off with a script, I have them wired to a xbox 360 power supply and a 10 port powered usb hub. The hard drives connect to the hub, the hub to the server. As you do. The fun part, the hub isolates power to the devices from the host pc so I can simply turn off power to the hub and the usb things disconnect. The idea being, if the usb controllers in the drives don’t have power from the hub or pc, it’s as if they’re physically disconnected so I can get around any stability issues they may have.

Is this a good solution? Probably not. A DAS box would be better but those aren’t cheap when I can get a whole used server for that price. starting at $200 usd and above for 8 bays. My goal is to reach 8 drives for the backup pool with simular capacity and quanity in the main pool. The Collection Must Grow.

At present, there’s 5 backup drives and 8 main drives. One of the main drives isn’t part of the pool, it has a different purpose. I have to add more backups as drives in the main pool get upgraded.

Scripting and automation⌗

I have integrated a script and a esp8266 module with tasmota to turn on the power supply. The script is able to turn on tthe hard drive power, mount the filesystems, initiate the backup, then mount and power down the drives.