Anecdata: I’ve found USB powered external drives to be unreliable on the Pi, even when powering the Pi with an official power adapter. I’d recommend using an external drive that comes with its own power adapter.
Counter anecdata: I've got a Ceph cluster running on multiple RPi 4s using external Seagate 4 and 5 TB portable hard drives. So far zero issues for about 1 year since I bootstrapped this cluster..
I use a combination of official RPi 4 power supplies and an Anker 6-port USB power block that I'm pretty sure tops out at less than 3 amps.
More importantly, everything is plugged into APC UPSes.
I use a combination of official RPi 4 power supplies and an Anker 6-port USB power block that I'm pretty sure tops out at less than 3 amps.
More importantly, everything is plugged into APC UPSes.