External HDD & Raid 1 USB3.0

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Hi,
I have got an TP-Link Archer C2600 and would like to install additional programs on an external HDD.
is there any recommendations on how to partition this HDD?
which filesystem?

I am thinking about installing mqtt, adblock, squid, fileserver and log to this HDD.
Also I want to set up a USB 3.0 raid1 which will contain the files that I would like to share via the file-server.

Is the archer C2600 powerful enough to run owncloud, or how should I provide file access in an windows, linux, android enviroment? samba?

2

First of all, one answer is already on the wiki: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/additional-software/extroot_configuration
With the capacity of the device I don't see the actual need of an extroot unless you're installing many programs. Anyway, already solved in the wiki.
Samba can run in that device, easily. The thing with raid is that it's pretty involved. It's more a general Linux question than an OpenWrt specific.

Anyway, EXT4 supports only some RAID configurations. XFS is probably out of the game (along with NTFS, f2fs, exfat, fat, ...). BTRFS is the only sensible choice but be careful that it's not "rock solid stable" and recovering from failure it's not trivial either.

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3

If you're thinking about RAID, any variant thereof, you do want native SATA (for all disks involved) - and practically x86_64.

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4

I run Nextcloud on a desktop distro, backed by ZFS. With the constant security updates to PHP, I wouldn't run it on a system that didn't have a simple package-upgrade system. With the need to run MariaDB, I wouldn't run it on much less than a couple GB of RAM. Taken even one at a time, those sort of rule out most all-in-one router hardware.

It's been a great application for me. I'd suggest at least a Raspberry Pi (which doesn't have dual-channel SATA), if not something like a PCEngines APU or ODROID H2.

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5

Kinda off topic:

If x86-64 Docker works well enough on OpenWrt (never tested have no x64 router hardware), this should be enough to run anything complicated. I would assume Owncloud/Nextcloud have official docker images and if not, you can use community builds like the ones from linuxserver.io . Ofc you need a 64bit host OS, since Docker on 32bit is a big hack and not worth the trouble.

6

thanks for all the answers. I will look through it and start testing a bit.
I am trying to back up my phone before it gets lost, it breaks or the display gets broken.
SO for now I think I will be fine with SAMBA.

I set up a SAMBA share and can access it from my windows 10 but not from my android.
Also I have problems getting the write access set up.
And good instructions somewhere to set up write access?
I can't make a 100% sense out of the stuff that I have found.
Will be back in a sec with my current configuration.

7

/etc/samba
path = /mnt/sda1
read only = no
create mask = 0700
directory mask = 0700

8

/etc/config
config sambashare
option 'name' 'backup01'
option 'path' '/mnt/sda1'
#option 'users' 'kermit'
option 'guest_ok' 'no'
option 'create_mask' '0700'
option 'dir_mask' '0700'
option read_only 'no'

9

Interspersing a comment here, as one can only post three times in a row, from what I remember. You can edit your posts ("pencil" icon), as well as posting "code" with the preformatted-text button, </>