BUILD USB 3.0 or eSATA for 4-bay enclosure

[Bacon Fox]

Basic hardware - Dell R210 II, 4x Seagate NAS 3TB, Mediasonic ProBox 4-bay enclosure

I've been running OpenMediaVault for about a year using an older Dell Optiplex 755 with 2 2TB Seagate NAS drives and two other random disks. The NAS drives are in a mirror, the others are just on their own.

I'm replacing all of the disks with 3TB Seagate NAS drives in this enclosure and switching to a Dell R210 II. I plan to run RAID-Z2. The array will host media, an ESXi datastore, and act as a backup target for two laptops. Irreplaceable data is backed up to an external drive and cloud storage. I will be using LACP across the two inbuilt Intel NICs.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to connect this enclosure to the new server and I've come up with a few options.

Option 1: eSATA using an ASM1061 based addon card. Currently using this card in the Optiplex. Works well
Option 2: USB 3.0 using a yet undetermined addon card.
Option 3: eSATA similar to above, but put two of the drives inside the R210 chassis.

My concern with Option 1 is more about resilvering speed should a drive fail. While the card is SATA III, the enclosure is only SATA II. Option 2 gives me 5gbps between the enclosure and the server, but I'm not sure about USB 3.0 support and whether or not that's a good idea with ZFS.

Option 3 is an OK solution, but I lose the ability to easily swap out a failed drive if that drive happens to be in the server itself. The R210 has two fixed mounting positions not available from outside the chassis. These drives may also run slightly warmer as the enclosure is fan cooled.

Raw performance isn't a huge concern. I imagine I could still saturate 1gig with Option 1. While I will be running LACP, it's unlikely I'll have two separate streams pulling full load.

Thoughts and advice are appreciated!

 

[Ericloewe]

None of these are in any way good solutions.

USB 3.0 support is as good as nonexistent, and USB is flaky, in general.

SATA port multipliers (required for running multiple drives with a single eSATA cable) are known to spontaneously turn into bitbuckets. Additionally, the only good SATA controllers are Intel's (so forget about cheap add-on cards) and you're limited to 1m total cabling.

What is a reasonable option is an enclosure that takes one eSATA cable per drive. I never found one that looked decent enough, so don't waste too much time looking for such a thing.

 

[anodos]

Your best bet for adding more drives is through an hba / expansion shelf (connected via SFF-8088 cable). These can be quite pricey.

A better option and less pricey is to get a server with enough drive bays

 

[Bacon Fox]

Thanks for the reality check. I appreciate it. I definitely want to do it right.

Back to the drawing board I suppose. I've got limited rack depth (about 16") and that's making things more difficult than they need to be.

 

[marbus90]

For virtualisation you want striped mirrors for performance. Even if it's just secondary storage and boot is somewhere else. Also be prepared to drop in 32GB RAM since iSCSI can get quite hungry.

I guess re-using the older server as backup target is the best idea.