External USB bays a good idea or a bad idea?

allanonmage

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Aug 20, 2023
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I'd like to hook up 1 or 2 USB drives to my NAS to facilitate backing up my super important stuff, which would be a small fraction of the main NAS storage.

I have an internal slot available, so I'm thinking something like this might work: https://www.newegg.com/p/2RC-0EH3-00005

Or I could use an external bay that holds multiple drives like this: https://www.newegg.com/orico-3549c3/p/0VN-0003-001U1, although there are a bunch of different kinds that look interesting, some are better and some are cheaper.

How good or bad of an idea is this? I'd probably use some more of the 14TB refurb drives that I've got as my main array, so the drives will be able to hold up as long as I cool them. I'm a little concerned about the hub and splitter/controller though, given this post. I doubt they would literally burn up, but I'm worried about compatibility and any kind of IOPS bottleneck of having 2-4 drives in the same enclosure. They are spinning drives, so even 2 won't saturate a USB 3.0 bus (5gbps), but I'm still looking a 3.1 or 3.2 version. I'm not sure ZFS IOPS and a USB hub with 2 drives attached would work. I'm thinking of 2 drives for 2 copies of backups, even if the 4 drive bays are really cool looking. I'd prefer to leverage the motherboard USB controller and have each drive connected to it's own USB port, but I'd rather not have a bunch of cables hanging around, that never works well.
 

morganL

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USB is best for just backing up the primary pool based on SATA/SAS. Single USB drives are better.

USB adds complexity and reduces performance and reliability You are more likely to find software, hardware and driver issues.
If the data is not critical... then an experiment may be worthwhile.
 

Ericloewe

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USB JBOD enclosures are also very, very junky (surpassed only by USB RAID enclosures). That is not conducive to a good experience.
 

Arwen

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To sum up. Not all will affect each user or their particular USB hardware. But, this summarizes the various problems;
 

somethingweird

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Ericloewe

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You'd think so, but eSATA is such a fragile thing that, incredibly, USB might be the better option.
 

allanonmage

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The reason that I'm looking at USB is that I'm out of SATA. Kinda of skipped that part, lol
 

somethingweird

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