cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/679471

Not sure the best place to ask this.

I have a DS420J 4 bay NAS, primarily used for my Plex server and data backups (among a few other things). I currently have 8x6x6 TB Iron Wolf NAS drives in a single volume with SRH and an extra 1 TB SSD JBOD. I have my Plex app and metadata stored on the SSD due to the increased performance I have seen vs. having it installed on the large pool (7200 RPM cap). I am sitting at about 85% used storage of my available 10.8 TB on the primary volume. As such, I am pre-planning my next storage upgrade and am curious about my options while staying with the current hardware. The future plan will be a NAS upgrade, but this little beast has been chugging along so perfectly I want to push it as far as I can.

If I was to remove the 1 TB drive and replace it with another 8 TB Iron Wolf, I would jump to 20 TB available storage. https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator?hdds=6 TB|6 TB|8 TB|8 TB This increase would last me for quite some time ahead of a full NAS upgrade with more bays. In order to do this, I would obviously need to remove the 1 TB SSD to be replaced by the new drive. I have na external enclosure for this drive that can connect over USB to the NAS.

My question: I am finding somewhat conflicting information on how external drives are intended to be used/what their capabilities are when connected to the USB 3.2 port. It seems the intended functionality for backups (which makes sense). Am I able to utilize a USB connected drive and have it function in a similar manner to it being internal? Are you able to install apps from the Package Center to an external drive? Create volumes? I assume there will be some performance degradation due to the translation from SATA to USB, then back to SATA, but I anticipate the SSD will still perform better than adding the app back to the main pool. I just don’t know if I am potentially missing something with my evaluation. Those that have more experience with USB connected drive with their NAS, I would love to hear your experience. Thanks!