FreeNAS System as giant USB drive

[damdude]

Hi Guys

I have a Freenas setup with 2TB of Hard drive connected to it. I have another device ( which I wont say the name) but lets say can only store stuff or you can access data from it using USB drive. it constantly writes to usb drive. so I am wondering if there is a way to connect this device's usb port to my freenas system so that when written by that device it goes directly to my freenas 2TB Hard drive's set location.

 

[Ericloewe]

tl;dr: No.

FreeBSD currently has no support for that kind of thing. Though it is in the works, you would need hardware capable of operating in USB slave mode, which I doubt you'll find on any server, even as USB Type C becomes more popular.

 

[damdude]

I think all the usb controller in INTEL boards has the capability to go in slave mode. and also this is not something new. Macbook has had this kind of feature ( target disk mode) for really long time. I am wonder why freenas doesnt have it until today

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Here's one idea.

Apple is company with a net worth estimated at more than $700 billion in February 2017, with cash reserves exceeding those of some small countries.

FreeNAS is an open source project based on FreeBSD, primarily developed by iXsystems, a company at least two orders of magnitude smaller than Apple.

;)

 

[danb35]

I am wonder why freenas doesnt have it until today

Lack of support in the underlying OS and lack of demand would be my guesses. FreeNAS is a NAS, i.e., Network Attached Storage. You're looking for DAS, which is something completely different.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I had a couple more thoughts on this too.

1. When a Mac is operating in target disk mode, it's essentially behaving as an extremely expensive disk enclosure, i.e. it's not running the OS.
2. Apple hardware is a closed platform over which Apple retain full control. Other OSes have to run on whatever the user has.