I have portable software RAID5/6 array made of bunch of USB drives. It’s ultra ghetto but it’s quite nice due to high portability and system independence.
I can just put it in bag and take it anywhere and then hook up to any laptop / pc / raspberry pi / embed / server/ whatever with linux. It’s all cool until it isn’t because usb hub crashes and 3 out of 7 drives drop off USB bus in the middle of array rebalance and whole array is trashed.
So I’m kinda looking for some equally portable solution but with a little bit less moving elments so I’m looking for some JBOD case (cases) that would allow me to pack 7-8 HDD drives and attach them usig 1 or 2 USB cables to Linux machine in a way that would allow me to set up software RAID (JBOD access).
Wendell seemed to have success with a Mediasonic Probox revision (usb 3.1?). Though I am not sure how it was configured. But in general I have had the same issues with raid as you, and without a USB hub.
General consensus seems to be that USB mass storage just isn’t stable enough for that kind of application (e.g. software raid).
I’m not entirely sure why eSATA fell out of favour as I suspect it might have addressed the stability issues.
I have a Sabrent DS-SC5B 5 bay USB JBOD enclosure that works great. It has a 10gb USB C connection and I use Drivepool to software raid them together. Haven’t had any issues other than USB related ones, but they are pretty uncommon. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Y4F5SCK/
That 10 bay version might be what you are looking for
I’ve seen them when I was looking for those but ngl… well… I may be biased but to me 300$ for glorified SATA to USB adapter is a bit of moneygrab. I don’t really understand why these cost so much and 10 bay version costs absolutely ridiculous money. Like… it’s not NAS, doesn’t have own OS, 10G NIC and stuff. It’s just USB HDD case. That Mediasonic Probox is at least somewhat affordable. I mean well it’s still quite pricey but within reasonable realms unlike Sabrent ones xD Maybe it’s because I’m coming from position of buying cheapest TB per dollar WD Elements drives which are often even cheaper than retail internal HDDs that are put inside XD
