What are the dis-advantages of those USB enclosures besides USB bandwidth bottle-necking issues?
Should one consider those vs PCIe SATA expansion cards and a good case? (and somehow solving the power supply problem)
or just using a Synology NAS although that’s bit different…
Have any of you had experience with similar enclosures ?
Basically none since USB 3.0 tops out at 400MB/s and you’ll be in the bottleneck area just in the beginning of a sequential write if you’re using those enclosures in RAID0 mode.
Never! The controller in those things are very very basic and tend to fail more often than more complex and reliable PCIe based controllers. If you can use a PCIe SATA card, even a 15$ one, you’re gonna have a better experience compared to one of those enclosures.
That’s a totally different beast, it’s a computer in and of itself.
No, but I’ve been looking for something like that for RAID0 cold storage that’s easy to connect. The flaw with all the enclosures I saw is the PSU that’s sold along those. Many many users complaine that hitting all the drives or most of them would make them go offline, some lost data due to power loss, some had the PSU fry itself. A definite no go for me.
Thanks for the thorough response MetalizeYourBrain,
Yeah, it does appear that reliability could be an issue, and that is least thing you want in a server or a home-server. Maybe it’ll be fine if you were to connect those on your laptop as a temporarily utility with a low amount of drives.
If you want multiple drives connected without limiting bandwidth, you really want Thunderbolt. USB is just too slow to keep up with more than one drive. Even a single SATA 2.5" SSD is bottlenecked by USB bandwidth.
QNAP offers Raid Expansion chassis that are connected via USB. That is more a cheapskate and easy to use for lowend needs. But it works. Just be aware that bandwidth is limiting your drive(s) when using USB.
I’d go for Thunderbolt if you want DAS. Or just buy a NAS with 10Gbe.
If you can, do it internally, that’s always more straight forward and cheaper than going external. I don’t know how much SATA ports you got, but usually there are plenty on the motherboard for common usage. HDDs and SSDs don’t draw much power , although the spin-up from HDDs at start is higher than regular. I calculate 10W for a HDD, half for a SATA SSD. If your PSU isn’t already at 90% load, it will usually fit.
My motherboard has 6 SATA ports, and currently all in use 3 HDDs 3 SSDs + M.2 boot-drive.
I think I can cram more drives in there. Tho, I’d prefer upgrading the case as well.
Check out IcyDock. If you need 2.5" or 3.5" bays, they got really good (although the fans are shit) products to make use of your 5.25" front slots. I almost bought that 3x5.25" slot → 5x 3.5" hotswap SATA/SAS HDD module. But I decided to get a new case, but those IcyDock products are great to bump up your old case and unused 5.25" slots. Or to just max out everything for SATA/SAS devices possible.
I’m not that familiar with HBA or SATA expansion cards, so can’t recommend any but there are people on the forums that know all the tricks.
SSD and HDD barely use any power…even if you had a 500W PSU and a non-overclocked CPU + GPU, I wouldn’t worry about 4 or 6 new drives tbh.
Thank you for your time Exard3k, I look into those soon, and consider the fit. Although, I’m not really interested in the hotswap, but maybe it’ll be useful when there are multiple drives.
I don’t really need it either, but it’s nice to have HDD LEDs visible for all drives and when things go south, you always know which drive died. Saves some try and error attempts to find the correct one. Minor things, but convenient nonetheless. I’m pretty sure there are other products out there. And if all things fail, you can always use duct tape to fixate your 2.5" SSDs somewhere in the case. Quick and easy solution.
