I need a large amount of external storage for an upcoming project. I'm planning on purchasing 10 2TB external drives. I need them all hooked up to a single machine at the same time. What issues will I run into?
I plan on using 2 power strips and having them all externally powered from the wall. I will use a USB hub to plug in all the drives. I need drive access time to be as fast as possible.
I am using Ubuntu Linux(64 bit). Will I be able to mount 10 drives?
I am looking at network-attached USB hubs in order to run licensed software in a virtualized environment when hardware dongles are required.
Are there any solutions that will work with both Linux and Windows? Most of the dedicated devices -- such as the Zonet ZUH2214 or the (oddly expensive) Digi AnywherUSB/2 -- appear to be Windows-only. Linux has the the USB/IP project, for which there appear to be Windows drivers, but the last "News" post on the site was in 2007, so I'm not entirely confident about the viability of the project.
Has anyone out there found a solution that will work well in both environments?
I am attempting to dismount an external USB drive using powershell and I cannot successfully do this. The following script is what I use:
#get the Win32Volume object representing the volume I wish to eject
$drive = Get-WmiObject Win32_Volume -filter "DriveLetter = 'F:'"
#call dismount on that object there by ejecting drive
$drive.Dismount($Force , $Permanent)
I then check my computer to check if drive is unmounted but it is not.
The Boolean parameters $force and $permanent have been tried with different permutations to no avail. The exit code returned by the dismount command changes when the params are toggled.
(0,0) = exit code 0
(0,1) = exit code 2
(1,0) = exit code 0
(1,1) = exit code 2
The documentation for exit code 2 indicates that there are existing mount points as a reason why it cannot dismount. Although I am trying to dismount the only mount point that exists so I am unsure what this exit code is trying to tell me.
Having already trawled the web for people experiencing similar problems I have only found one additional command to try and that is the following:
# executed after the .Dismount() command
$drive.Put()
This additional command does not help.
I am running out of things to try, so any assistance anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated.
From time to time I eject a USB device, generally a memory stick or external HDD, when I think I have finished transferring data only to realise there's something else I need to do with it. Normally this involves nothing more than unplugging the device and plugging it back in. What about if I'm doing the work from remote? Is there a command I can run that will have Windows re-detect and mount the device?
Update:
Thanks to all who responded.
Although some of the suggested methods will work they also cause problems if another device is connected via the same hub. Others, such as devcon, may well work for others but failed for me, although I don't know why not and won't be investigating it any further.
I would have preferred not to have to rely on a commercial product but Safelyremove, suggested in the accepted answer, worked so well in my tests I consider it a keeper.
I have: