this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
23 points (96.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40041 readers
722 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I am trying to figure out the optimal way to connect an 8 bay drive enclosure to a Dell Optiplex 7040 Micro. The end goal is to have the drives made available to a Proxmox cluster and kubernetes cluster. This is all for learning experience as well as to run services for personal use.

The cluster will be made up of 2x Optiplex 7040 and 2x Optiplex 3040. All have i7-6700t CPUs, the 3040s have 16GB DDR3 and 1TB SATA SSD each, and the 7040s each have 32GB DDR4 and 2TB NVMe drive with an additional empty SATA port on the motherboard. The enclosure is a MediaSonic ProBox with USB3.0 and eSATA interfaces available

I have heard that you shouldn’t use USB to connect to storage so I have been trying to figure out a way to use eSATA even though the Optiplex does not have an eSATA port. I found some SATA to eSATA cables on eBay, would that enable me to connect the enclosure directly to the free SATA port on the Optiplex?

Would this setup work? Is it worth it to sacrifice the additional SATA port on one of the 7040s in order to avoid using USB? I would like to maximize stability and speed.

I have not yet decided how I want to configure the drives but was planning to look into either a ZFS pool or ceph. All drives in the enclosure will be for media storage (movies/tv/music, was planning to keep pictures and documents elsewhere) and passed to LXCs and a kubernetes cluster I plan to run on Proxmox.

Any guidance on the connection setup, storage configuration, or my plans in general would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SheeEttin@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm. I would probably use some kind of SATA to eSATA adapter for the least amount of purchasing.

But if you want to have small form factor compute nodes, I'd suggest replacing the dumb enclosure with a smarter (and faster) NAS or SAN. This way, you wouldn't be relying so much on janky hacks.

[–] AlphaAutist@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Ok thanks and ya I plan to upgrade to something better suited for the job at some point. I just want to get started and use what I have as efficiently as I can.