So some time ago I asked about Btrfs software RAID compatible USB enclosures.
However in the end I didn’t buy anything at that time. After a while though, I received some old refurbed 8TB HDDs from friend for free and I decided to use them for portable (relatively) backup raid array. I received 8 drives in total so I decided to get two 4 bay 10G enclosures in order to get 20G total bandwidth - and that’s what I started looking for.
One of options that came across thread mentioned above was ICY BOX enclosure. I always saw ICY BOX as kinda “chinese” but still relatively dependable brand that shouldn’t produce any crap so I must admit I was a bit confused when I looked at comments under product page, on my local store website.
They were bad. Really bad. 2.5/5 stars and plenty of 1 star reviews that claimed that enclosure drops disks, doesn’t work at all etc. One of “Q&A” topics mentioned that there are “known issues with ZFS using this enclosure”. That was good, specific topic to look for in the internet and that’s what I did. Quick Google led me to this GitHub thread:
https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/11741
And this:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=257840
But come on - it’s ICY BOX and not EVERYONE complains right? There must be something to it. Very mixed reviews in the internet indeed suggested that this issue may indeed be bound to very specific, yet large group of customers - such as owners of Zen 3 based PCs mentioned by GitHub issue.
Luckily I’m on Threadripper 5000 plafrom! Sooo… oh wait. Sh*t. It’s Zen 3.
But luckily - I’m dumb! So I bought it anyways c:
And it didn’t work.
Of course I wasn’t entirely that dumb without any good reason - I still had one trick up my sleeve. I’m on ASRock WRX80 Creator motherboard and that bad boy has Thunderbolt 3 built-in. And Thunderbolt - means Intel. And people said that it works quite fine with Intel platforms. Also one guy on GitHub mentioned that enclosure worked completely fine for him when he used dedicated pci-e based USB controller instead of AMD onboard ones, even on AMD platform. So I had quite a few good reasons to believe that I will be able to make it work… somehow using different USB controller.
I actually kinda felt it’s gona be troublesome yet interesting journey to analyze why exactly it doesn’t work and I kinda wanted to write up some guide, when I finally figure that out - how you can make it work on Zen 3. And that’s what I’m doing right now.
First things first - I checked whether it works with my Thunderbolt docking station (so whether it works on AMD workstation, when you use Intel based USB controller). And yes - yes it does. However I only had one Thunderbolt controller and two 10G enclosures so I kinda needed second 10G non-AMD controller in my workstation. And I had one - in my Quadro RTX 4000 gpu. So I connected that HDD enclosure to my GPU and… it didn’t really work actually… But more on that later…
Since it’s very peculiar workstation I had OWC Shuttle M.2 enclosure that has built-in PLX switch and instead of SSDs, I had M.2 USB controller there, used as pass-through for VMs. However it was some crappy VIA based 5G USB 3.0 controller, not suitable for this job, so I decided to upgrade it. And I bought this:
ASMedia 3142 based controller in M.2 form factor from AliExpress. It had cost me like 20$, shipping included so not too bad, doesn’t take up too many lanes and as a bonus I’m gonna have better USB controller in VMs now. Took around week to arrive. After installing it in OWC enclosure, I connected ICY BOX enclosure with full confidence and…
It still didn’t work :T
When I connected that controller to case front panel - enclosure was negotiating 5G USB 3.0. When I connected it to active 10G hub, it did negotiate as 10G but as soon as I started transferring any data it kept crashing with i/o errors. Apparently it didn’t work in very similar way to NVidia USB controller. And that was kinda peculiar.
After hours of troubleshooting it turned out to be problem with signal integrity. Apparently this enclosure is EXTREMELY fragile when it comes to connection stability and signal integrity. I didn’t want to keep it in the middle of my desk so I used my own 2m USB-C 10G cable, instead of using one provided with enclosure - and that was mistake. It simply wasn’t good enough and the way enclosure was crashing because of that was farily catastrophic. As soon as I realized that cable may be an issue, I replaced it with very high quality Thunderbolt 3 cable and suddenly… All issues were gone. And it did now work with NVidia USB controller as well and basically with any controller that is not AMD one.
Interestingly though - USB controller in Intel docking station seemed to be much less affected by bad quality cables comparing to other controllers that I tested so I guess all I can say is that Intel is just really good at doing USB stuffs.
And unfortunately cost of 2m Thunderbolt 3 cable was not… 20$ sooo… at this point your economical mileage may vary.
But at the end of the day - with correct USB controller and correct cables this enclosure plows. I’m getting stable 220 MB/s on all 4 drives simultaneously so at this point HDDs speed itself is bottleneck, not USB interface. Also it’s worth to note that apart from absolute nightmare with compatibility and troubleshooting on Zen 3 systems - it’s actually very nice enclosure. Like, really nice. For that price? It feels really well designed, even though some parts do feel cheap in terms of like cheap plastic - the way it’s used is very clever and definitely my favourite part is piece of plastic used as “bracket” which is very small, uses screws as “hinges” and is shaped in a way that makes HDD pop-out of connector after pulling it down. It’s peak engineering for 5 cents. Also it’s relatively compact and quite portable.
Fan is quite loud tho, but somewhat easily replace’able without enclosure disassembly. It uses some 2 pin connector though so will require either soldering or quick connects to replace with Noctua.
Red Bull for scale. They’re really compact. Overall I’m very happy with this purchase and even with 20$ for additional USB controller on top of enclosure price - it’s still great value. And if you don’t have Zen 3 then it should even work ootb so extremely good value.
Would buy again.