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0 pointssquarefoot2y ago0 comments

I recently migrated my NAS from a Mini-ITX mainboard to a mini PC. Although there are m.2 cards with multiple SATA ports on board, they would require either to keep the PC open or mount it into a bigger case with multiple disks bay. I chose instead a more costly but potentially more stable solution with a IcyBox IB-3780-C31 enclosure (8xSATA to USB3.1) which is well supported by either Linux and FreeBSD, which is important as I use XigmaNAS. The mini PC I used was the only one with a USB3.1 port on board CPU is a N5105 which is more than enough for 4 ZFS mirrors. Feel free to ask if you need more information.

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hollerith2y ago· 4 in thread

I've lost data by having as my home directory an external drive connected via USB (on an ext4 file system). Then I found a comment on this site saying that Linux's USB driver is known to be unreliable when layering a file system (terminology?) over it.

jcrawfordor2y ago

these types of enclosures are going to be using UAS, USB attached SCSI, which is relatively new. It should deliver a more reliable and manageable experience for external drive enclosures in general (e.g. proper addressing of which drive you want to talk to). If nothing else it's a different code path though.

I've been using a multi-drive UAS enclosure over USB3 as the storage for a VMS for some time, it feels a little weird given USB's history but it has been very reliable and easily saturates the drives from a bandwidth perspective. I'll probably go the same route for bulk storage in the future, since it's a lot easier to get small machines with USB than small machines with 4+ SATA channels.

Bagged23472y ago

Which UAS enclosure are you using? Would you recommend it? Any quirks to know about?

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transpute2y ago

In theory, USB could be avoided with DIY JBOD:

  - Thunderbolt to NVME M.2 enclosure
  - M.2 to SATA breakout

Or:

  - Thunderbolt to NVME M.2 enclosure
  - M.2 to PCIe slot
  - LSI HBA PCIe card to SATA

hollerith2y ago

What I do is I keep using the same (Samsung T7) external drive I lost the data on, but now I use it only to transfer data from one computer's internal drive to another computer's.

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