• Lenovo ThinkCentre / Dell OptiPlex USFF machine like the M710q.
• Secondary NVMe or SATA SSD for a RAID1 mirror
  • Use LVMRAID for this. It uses mdraid underneath but it’s easier to manage
• External USB disks for storage
  • WD Elements generally work well when well ventilated
  • OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad has a very well implemented USB path and has been problem-free in my testing
• Debian / Ubuntu LTS
• ZFS for the disk storage
• Backups may require a second copy or similar of this setup so keep that in mind when thinking about the storage space and cost

Here’s a visual inspiration:

Yes, yes I would use ZFS if I had only one file on my disk.

OK, I think it may have to do with the odd number of data drives. If I create a raidz2 with 4 of the 5 disks, even with ashift=12, recordsize=128K, the performance in sequential single thread read is stellar. What’s not clear is why this doesn’t affect, or not as much, the 4x 8TB-drive raidz1.

Found the bit counter

Thanks for the warning ⚠️🙏

This isn’t my first rodeo with ZFS on USB. I’ve been running USB for a few years now. Recently I ran this particular box through a battery of tests and I’m reasonably confident that with my particular set of hardware it’ll be fine. It passed everything I threw at it, once connected to a good port on my machine. But you’re generally right and as you can see I discussed that in the testing thread, and I encountered some issues that I managed to solve. If you think I’ve missed something specific - let me know! 😊

That was the cheapest option. 🤭

Two machines. A main server/workstation and a small off-site backup machine that runs the same services but hass less compute and RAM.

• 8x 8TB in a set of 2, some shucked WDs, some IronWolfs
• 5x 16TB in a set of 2, “recertified” WDs from serverpartdeals.com

And now it no longer shows up.

Quite possibly. That said the one I linked is CUI, not a noname. It’s even got an MTBF of 300K hours in its datasheet. There are cheaper ones. 😅 And more expensive ones.

I see a number of dual-output PSUs on Mouser that will probably fit well if this goes. For example.

Yeah, I googled that IC, no hits. 😂

Done. Says 150W on it. Not sure if it’s real. If it is, then it’s plenty overrated for the hardware which should bode well for its longevity. Especially given that the caps are Chengx across the board so definitely not the best. :D Can you tell anything interesting about it from the pics?

Whatever makes you sleep at night. ☺️

Finally happy with the testing. I’ll disassemble it sometime today.

440 pounds is insane, agreed. 😂

Yeah I get it then. So it depends on whether one has PCIe slots available, 3.5" bays in the case, whether they can change the case if full, etc. It could totally make sense to do under certain conditions. In my case there’s no space in my PC case and I don’t have any PCIe slots left. In addition, I have an off-site machine that’s an USFF PC which has no PCIe slots or SATA ports. It’s only available connectivity is USB. So in my case USB is what I can work with. As long as it isn’t exorbitantly expensive, a USB solution has flexibility in this regard. I would have never paid 440 pounds for this if that was the price. I’d have stayed with single enclosures nailed to a wooden board and added a USB hub. 🥹 Which is how they used to be:

Please elaborate.

What I parse that you’re talking about is a PCIe SATA host controller and a box for the disks. Prior to landing on the OWC, I looked at QNAP’s 4-bay solution that does this - the TL-D400S. That can be found around the $300 mark. The OWC is $220 from the source. That’s roughly equivalent to 4 of StarTech’s enclosures that use the same chipset.

I wasn’t able to reach it for a top-down visual through the back and so I don’t have pics of it other than the side view already attached. I’ll try disassembling it further sometime today, once the ZFS scrub completes.

Luckily, the PSU is connected to the main board via standard molex. If the built-in one blows up, you could replace it with any ATX PSU, large, small (FlexATX, etc), or one of those power bricks that spit out a 5V/12V molex. Whether you can stuff it in or not.

I was wondering what would be better for discoverability, to write this in a blog post, on GitHub, then link it here, or to just write it here. Turns out Google’s crawling Lemmy quite actively. This shows up within the first 10-15 results for “USB DAS ZFS”:

It appears that Lemmy is already a good place for writing stuff like this. ☺️

5950X, 64GB

It’s a multipurpose machine, desktop workstation, games, running various servers.