Curious if anyone has had any success, or thoughts on this approach?
I have an Intel NUC with a Thunderbolt port, as well as an Akitito Thunderbolt DAS. I’d like to store critical data on the DAS, so stability is key, but I’m also not made of money, so using what HW I have is of course preferred.
I was thinking TrueNAS Scale since Linux TB driver support seems better. This way I could expose the drives over PCIe vs USB.
What does the braintrust think?
Thanks in advance.
My experience is with USB 3.2 gen 2 2x2 (or whatever BS name they have for it. Just 20gb USB) rather than Thunderbolt, so a little bit different but the same connectors. Overall it works very well, but I did find that the first cable I tried started going bad after a few months leading to drives dropping out. I couldnt figure it out at first, just thinking maybe this is typical of USB connected DAS and why people often recommend against it. However, I did change the cable out to a new one and now I havent had any problems since. Been about 2 years with that. It does seem to work well as long as the cable is made right. Speed is fine, not much slower than attached via sata on a MB.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. Since it is USB, I assume you’re just doing a general Samba share versus adding drives to a RAID/ZFS pool or anything like that correct?
I didnt set up any specific share because the drives are direction attached to the computer I needed the storage on. I do plenty of shares from my NAS though using SMB Direct, but all drives connected to the NAS are either sata onto the motherboard or sata over external HBA.
I ran Scale on a NUC for a few years with an 8 bay thunderbolt DAS.
It worked great. No dropouts, no strange issues, nothing. Just had to make sure the device was plugged in at boot, since it behaved strangely if you hot-plug, but I think that was more about the JMC575 controllers residing within the thunderbolt system than anything else.
I have been thinking about getting one of these from OWC and using one of the Thunderbolt/USB4 ports on my X670E Pro Art mobo for something more than bragging rights. Coming from a lifetime of mac use, I have had a lot of experience with OWC and have found their stuff to be top notch. Considering Thunderbolt is PCIe I want to do a ZFS pool on it as well. Still thinking however.
It comes with OWCs own software RAID, there is no hardware RAID anything inside this device. It can also be ordered without their Software.
That’s the exact model I’ve had for about 3 years now, I think? It’s solid.
Extremely reliable, and works great on my new B650E Taichi.
This device presents disks as JBOD, so you can do whatever you want with them.
When I ordered mine, it didn’t come with any software that I needed to install. I just threw disks in, plugged it in and there were 8x 8TB disks in /dev.
That’s great to hear, you have calmed my last misgivings. I’ll go ahead and order one.
I should have been more clear, it can come with Softraid, or it can come with no software. For my purposes I am ordering the no software version.
So the new question is, which of these 12TB drives to get from ServerPartDeals.com?
Glad I could help with the enclosure!
I can’t help with that, unfortunately, I always buy new drives.
I get that, I did as well when I got my 45Homelab HL15 and did not know that recertified drives were a thing. IMO, if they’re good enough for Wendell, they’re good enough for me. Plus, it saves a bundle.
edit: I went with the Seagate Ironwolf drives.