**Updated post**     <—- Go to this one after reading this one over!

Let me preface this post by saying this is extremely experimental and definitely not supported by Synology and is only a test on my XPENology DS3615xs. I will also add that you will need to reboot your box at least once.

So I had a few WD MyPassport 3TB external USB 3.0 hard drives laying around and I really wanted to turn them into a RAID1 group to see what I could do with them. This is really dumb, but trust me, I’ve done worse. So I got to digging.

I really couldn’t find anything on Synology or XPENologys forum, well because this is not a good idea,  but I kept digging. After about 30 minutes of digging like a hot dog digging a cool dirt hole, I came across a post by someone who was running into issues going over 20 drives and bingo, I found a diamond in the rough!

My Specs:

  • Running DSM 6.1.3 Update 8  (Read below for update)
  • Two (2) WD My Passport 3TB USB 3 Drives
  • USB 3.1 ports on Mobo

To get started, SSH into your box and run the following command:

sudo vi /etc.defaults/synoinfo.conf

 

Find and change the following lines within this file:

FROM:
maxdisks="12"
usbportcfg="0x300000"

TO:
maxdisks="24"
usbportcfg="0x300000000"

 

Reboot your box.

When my DSM came back online, I went to the Storage Manager and the two external HDDs now showed up as internal HDDs and I was able to add them to a RAID group. Great Success!

With some surface testing, I was able to get 50-120MB/sec with these two (super) slow external drives and turn them into something somewhat useful, for now.

Happy hacking!

 

Update: 11/26/17

Again, even though this isn’t probably the best use of a proper NAS configuration, after some more reading and poking around on the internet this could be a great use case for a Synology “HA” setup as a target to mirror your data to as a ‘Passive’ node on a Synology HA Cluster. An example of this would be a nicely equipped Active (Master) Node and then a node with just enough power to safely replicate your data to and keep safe in case your Active node has a major hardware failure.

Another use case is (old) HDDs mounted in an external enclosure such as a USB 3.1, USB-C or an eSATA enclosure. Note: for eSATA, the eSATA flag would need to be changed in the synoconf.conf file.

 

Update: 12/5/17

I’ve recently updated to DSM 6.1.4 Update 2 and this no longer works. Not sure what they changed but I am working on a workaround. Will create another updated post when I figure it out.