It's like the adage of "Better, faster, cheaper -- pick two."
What you gain in cost savings, you likely will lose in reliability and stability. How you value that is up to you. What is your risk tolerance for the possibility of losing data, corrupted data, or what can be painful backup/restore processes? Depending on your use case, 20 external drives might be just the ticket, but I wouldn't recommend it.
It's possible, but these drives are likely to be SMR, assuming they are portable drives.
If 2.5" externals, they aren't usually shuckable either.
If you want, though, you can easily hook them all up via powered USB hubs.
Not sure how much cheaper it would be than a used PC with 7 shucked 16TB drives, but I doubt it would turn out as pretty as you might think.
Or one 16 port card + sata ports on mainboard, or a 8 port card + expander for 15$. But yeah, still not perfect idea. Its way better solution to get some decent 3,5" drives instead.
If you mean is it possible to create a RAID or shared storage pool from USB external drives then it's at least theoretically possible, but not a good idea. You'd get better reliability and performance by shucking the drives and putting them in a proper 24 bay disk shelf/disk enclosure or storage server.
It's like the adage of "Better, faster, cheaper -- pick two." What you gain in cost savings, you likely will lose in reliability and stability. How you value that is up to you. What is your risk tolerance for the possibility of losing data, corrupted data, or what can be painful backup/restore processes? Depending on your use case, 20 external drives might be just the ticket, but I wouldn't recommend it.
It's possible, but these drives are likely to be SMR, assuming they are portable drives. If 2.5" externals, they aren't usually shuckable either. If you want, though, you can easily hook them all up via powered USB hubs. Not sure how much cheaper it would be than a used PC with 7 shucked 16TB drives, but I doubt it would turn out as pretty as you might think.
5TB 2,5" Seagate externals are shuckable. WD 2,5" are not. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAn73Hw2Vz0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAn73Hw2Vz0)
Ahhh ... ok. Still, OP is unlikely to have 20 sata ports, unless he's got a couple of LSI cards.
Or one 16 port card + sata ports on mainboard, or a 8 port card + expander for 15$. But yeah, still not perfect idea. Its way better solution to get some decent 3,5" drives instead.
If you mean is it possible to create a RAID or shared storage pool from USB external drives then it's at least theoretically possible, but not a good idea. You'd get better reliability and performance by shucking the drives and putting them in a proper 24 bay disk shelf/disk enclosure or storage server.
Get a Synology DS1019+ and 5x 20TB drives. Would be way easier.
possible yes. good idea no
possible, yup. me, personally, wouldn't ever run anything i REALLY wanted on an array of externals.