Adding eSATA and ext. enclosure to Dell 7040 SFF ?

[JohnAtl]

I’ve been running TrueNAS 12 in a VM under Ubuntu 20 on a refurbished Dell 7040 SFF (i7, 16GB, 1T) with 3x 1T NVME drives and it’s working really well.

Since that machine also dual-boots Windows for a project I’m working on, I'm thinking about buying another to be a dedicated Ubuntu and TrueNAS in a VM machine, but I’m not too familiar with eSATA. I do know that this computer does not support bifurcation, if that is a factor. I may scavenge drives 4x 4T WD Red CMR from my Synology (which is working fine, but, you know, gotta mess with things).

Any idea if the following will play well with this machine?
All of this would cost about $600 dollars.

Thanks for any guidance!

Syba 5 Bay SY-ENC50118

StarTech.com 2 Port SATA 6 Gbps PCI Express eSATA PEXESAT32

Dell 7040-SFF manual

 

[JohnAtl]

Forgot to add this, as mentioned in the Syba enclosure listing.

• East interface requires port Multiplier w/FIS-based switching on main computer to enable access to multiple HDDs simultaneously

i have no idea.

 

[sretalla]

Syba 5 Bay SY-ENC50118

This is probably not a good option for TrueNAS. Port multiplier doesn't go well outside of Windows due to a lack of use of such hardware in the enterprise systems that FreeBSD (among others) sees most use in.

StarTech.com 2 Port SATA 6 Gbps PCI Express eSATA PEXESAT32

You would do much better to have an HBA, which shouldn't be much more than that in terms of cost. You could then connect an external JBOD enclosure over SAS cables.

Amazon.com

Something like these... search for jbod enclosure SFF8644 (but not on amazon, apparently they don't have any)

Netstor JBOD Storage Chassis Enclosures

We offer a wide selection of Netstor JBOD Storage Chassis Enclosures for industrial and IT applications

dynapowerusa.com

 

[Ericloewe]

Quite honestly, I'd take a spaghetti monster of USB 3.2 hubs and external hard drives than anything with a SATA port multiplier in it. That's how bad they are. At least the USB to SATA bridges work fairly reliably once you figure out which ones are worth anything.

 

[JohnAtl]

Thanks @sretalla and @Ericloewe !

Quite honestly, I'd take a spaghetti monster of USB 3.2 hubs and external hard drives than anything with a SATA port multiplier in it.

Thanks for this!
You anticipated my next question.
Would there be an advantage either way to using, say, a 4-bay USB enclosure with a single cable to the computer, or 4 discrete drives connected with 4 cables to the computer?

 

[Ericloewe]

In the same way that a Yugo is nominally better than a Trabant, yes.

 

[sretalla]

Would there be an advantage either way to using, say, a 4-bay USB enclosure with a single cable to the computer, or 4 discrete drives connected with 4 cables to the computer?

Just to eliminate any lack of clarity, USB drives are not recommended as data pool disks. The demands placed on the components that are in those devices by ZFS transaction groups usually cause unexpected results such as early failure of controllers (which you could argue should be almost never in a solid state component, but I have personally witnessed several in my own experimentation and see plenty of reports of the same by others here). Any Kind of USB enclosure is even more likely to prove problematic (RAID circuits built-in, duplicate serial numbers showing for disks... ).

 

[JohnAtl]

Just to eliminate any lack of clarity, USB drives are not recommended as data pool disks.

Thanks for the follow up.
I formerly had my nvme drives connected through usb enclosures, and the performance was abysmal, so wasn’t leaning heavily that way. (They work great in PCIe M2 cards.)

I ordered a refurbished Dell T320 today, which should do the job.
2.2 GHz Xeon, 72GB ECC RAM, 8x3TB sas or sata drives, PERC RAID (will reflash), dual supplies
For about the same price as cobbling something together.

Thanks again!