Hi Silvia,
the D54250WYK has 4 external USB 3.0 ports and 2 internal headers.
I'm just using the external ports, no extra HUB or internal hacks.
I had a USB keyboard, mouse & mini-DVI screen connected while I was setting it up
but once it was stable I was able to do everything via SSH and I plugged a drive in
each USB port (and RAIDZ2 lets me disconnect one of the drives at any time
without risking data loss, so if I need to hook up the keyboard again it's no problem).
Don't forget that it boots from the internal mSATA disk, so the 4 external disks
are really only holding data, nothing which the machine needs to run.
Over the last 6 weeks I've had disks drop-out on me about 5 times - the last time was
about 4 days ago.
If intel is using this information for new ideas, I'm only using this hacked-together setup
because I didn't find anything like a NUC with room for 4, 2.5" disks and a very small
footprint and power requirement. I've measured my system and it idles at just under 11W
and never goes above 35W, no matter how hard I push it (although I'm not doing anything
with graphics). I'd love to see a NUC with room for 4, 2.5" disks (via SATA? hot pluggable?).
At least on paper this seems like the way to go, if I can make it reliable.
Thanks in advance,
Steve
