I have a bit of a weird use case and I’d love some input if what I’m considering is crazy/not doable.
Basically, we need to transfer data to an external USB device using one of our servers. The transfer must happen from this server and it must be transferred to this external drive for reasons outside my control. I don’t have the ability to change this process, and I’m just trying to figure out a feasible way of making it happen.
The drive is a 4 TB crucial X10 and the server is a HP DL360 Gen 9 (all the info I have on it) running some flavor of Linux (I think rocky but no certain I don’t have access to it). The issue is that the drive is formatting at ~6.8 MB/s which means that alone is going to take ~7 days, which is not ideal for the timeline we’re dealing with. Not to mention afterwards we’re going to need to write data to the drive and that will also take days.
I have no idea if this is possible, but I was considering getting a PCIe to USB-C adapter (possibly connecting it via a PCIe extension since it’s 1U?
Is this a terrible idea? Is it even possible to do this? Happy to ask our IT for any other information on the configuration if that helps. This is definitely way above my paygrade and just trying to figure out a reasonable solution.
That’s a strange one. I’ve had to do similar in the past with a Gen9 server (though running Windows) also with a Crucial SSD and didn’t encounter any real issues with USB speeds. Is it the same on both front and back USB3 connectors? Worth checking if there’s any cable damage or such also.
Is the server physically running Linux or is it a hypervisor with the USB device passed through to a VM running on the box? It could be that the SSD has been passed through in an inappropriate fashion somehow.
If it’s a physical host running Linux, then a PCIe USB card is definitely an option if there’s a spare slot in the box, something like the StarTech PEXUSB321C would be allow the SSD to stretch its legs as much as possible.
It’s a 1 time transfer to the drive. Basically a dump from cloud storage onto this drive. It’s more backup storage as a copy of information hosted in the cloud we’re pulling it from. Possible that some copies will be created from the files on this main drive to other locations but unclear at this time.
It does unfortunately have to be this drive. We can’t use SATA because all the bays on the server are currently in use by other parts of the Infra.
And since it might come up, we also do need to use this server specifically. The reasons are kinda weird and I can’t really explain, but it’s out of my control and we need to use this box.
Discussed with some people on the Discord and issues point to it being a potential problem with the drive after some further troubleshooting. The ports we were using on the HP DL360 Gen 9 are actually USB 3.0 so we should be getting way better rates that what we are and we tested on a windows machine as well and had similar speed issues. Unfortunately we don’t have any drives available to test but have ordered another one so hopefully that will resolve the issue.
Sounds like the PCIe–>USB might have actually worked though if the ports were the problem.
Will update once we have the new drive and can test it with that. Appreciate everyone’s help !!!
using debian linux(bookworm/12) this device worked fairly well. notice that i am not sure if wiring issues i had were related to this device or the cheap cables ordered to bring the type-c connectors out at the pci slot. software wise, it worked great with the elgato cam links that was used(only 3.0/5gbps devices). also, beware… there are a few “manufacturers” of this device, but if you look at the device they are identical.
edit: so generic in fact, i posted the wrong link
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