Thanks. My new ironwolf disk reached 61 degrees in an hour while doing a long test, I aborted it and took it out, added it to the NAS just for testing and disk was fine. I saw some amazon reviewer mentioning how they moded the device to install a tiny fan by cutting the back etc, sounded like a lot of hassle…
Yes I’ll be keeping the disk offline at 20~22 celsius. I prefer not to lose 2 USB ports for this but I can make things work if that’s the only way. (I use Asrock x570D4U too btw), as long as it’s likely to work out OK with TrueNAS. There are many fan-equipped cheap enclosures (e.g. this one I found after searching for the unavailable product of the same brand in the backup resource article). Based on the long list of issues with USB, I suppose the only way for me would be to experiment with the particular enclosure to see how it goes? I have a shallow understanding of how replication tasks work in general. So let’s say the enclosure sometimes acts up; will I always know, i.e. by seeing an error in the task log, if something goes wrong and the backup is corrupted? In that case I could mitigate it by rotating 2 disks.