Can I use more than one USB drive?

Community Playground General Discussions
1

I have a powered hub attached to a VeraPlus and an RFXTRX controller and USB drive attached and Vera logs are going to the USB drive.

Can I attach another USB drive to the hub and use it for e.g. data logging purposes using Datamine for instance and if so how do I tell Vera to use one drive and datamine to use the other?

I have searched the forums but can’t find much that helps with this

2

Vera has not been very reliably in USB attached storage.
Most folks have opted for network attached storage.

3

Thank you for an amazingly prompt response!

I will have a look for topics about NAS - any basic guides out there?

A tad more expensive that a USB drive… :wink:

4

You can attach another USB stick to the hub and log your DataMine/DataYours results to it. There are several threads that discuss this.

But Richard is correct, though he didn’t explain why.(He’s got to be brief so as to have time to add great features and provide support for all his amazing plugins!) The issue is that USB drives in a hub can be loaded in different orders, each time Vera reboots. This causes your logging drive to become your Datamine drive and vice versa, which then results in errors and the total loss of all data.

As @RichardTSchaefer indicated people in the past have had better results using SMB/CIFS to connect to a network share. The share could be an always on PC or a NAS type device.

The NAS device could take many different forms. For instance, many consumer WiFi routers now have a USB port that allows you to plug in a USB stick or drive and share it on the network. You may already have this. About the cheapest store bought standalone NAS device you’ll find is going to be something like the WD 2TB My Cloud Personal Network Attached Storage. You may also be able to build your own, less expensive, NAS with a Raspberry Pi or something similar.

Unfortunately, the Vera Plus does not have CIFS support at this time. It is expected to be added in a future firmware release, but there’s no telling when that might be. It is a relatively simple addition, but Vera is very busy trying to resolve other Vera Plus issues that impact more people than the absence of CIFS, so it might be a while before they get around to adding CIFS to their firmware.

Right now, your best option is to choose whether you want USB logging or DataMine logging and use that alone until Vera adds CIFS to the Vera Plus.