Hey all,
I want to add 4 HDDs externally to my server, which i use for jellyfin, some cloud etc. I was thinking about getting a SAS port like the LSI 9300 8e. The problem i have is that i dont know where to store my HDDs. I need a power supply and ideally a case or something. I have the feeling you find a lot of DAS solutions with usb which are to avoid or eSATA which throttles everything down. Have you any recommendations for cases and power supplies for me? and if you know a good all in one DAS where every hdd as a seperate sata port, please let me know.
For a little perspective, if you have 7200 RPM HDDs, they each only have a throughput of about 1.5 Gbps. USB 3.0 is 5 Gbps, so you can have 3 drives attached without maxing out a single USB connection, and that’s the older 3.0, not any of the newer USB specifications that can go up to 20 gbps, and this isn’t including thunderbolt specs. If this data is mostly sent over the network you’ll never see any impact from this unless you have a 10Gb home network. Getting things onto the drives might take a little longer than a direct connection, but if storage is more of a concern (I’m assuming it is, since you have HDDs instead of SSDs) that’s a perfectly fine trade off in my mind.
well, USB is known to be kinda iffy with random timeouts etc. I dont know. I would like to have those drives in a raid5 configuration and i assume running all of this over a single connection would throttle everything down. I heard e-sata would be a better alternative but also kinda slow. my server sadly doesnt support thunderbold. Also i am a bit worried that the reading speeds would be to slow for something like jellyfin (if that isnt already the case)
Before I switched to my big NAS, I had 7 extra USB drives attached to my old ones, daisy chained over two USB 3.0 hubs. The USB connection was never the limiting factor.
You would need something like 3 people simultaneously streaming a 4k movie from 3 different HDDs for that to be an issue.
HDD speed itself might be more limiting, but still would require multiple very high bitrate streams to max out the read speed of a general USB drive.
Yeah i assume that the hdds might be more the limiting factor. As mentioned, i am just worried about usb causing troubles with my data.