this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Qestions about eSATA vs USB3.0 for a drive enclosure connected to Proxmox (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by AlphaAutist@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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!

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[–] tuff_wizard@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

it says on that mediasonic link

Important Note: • For eSata connection: Make sure your eSata port Support port multiplier. Most onboard eSata and some eSata PCI-E card only Support up to 5 drives. To see all 8 hard drives in eSata you need a eSata PCIe card that supports 8 drives.

I'm assuming the enclosure doesn't do any of the raid/array configuration, it just passes data through.

as far as I know only USB and eSata can do port multiplying. I think if you want to get access to all the drives you'll have to get a pcie card to handle the eSata or just use USB3. eSata (6gb/s) is faster than USB3 (5gb/s) and you might actually manage to saturate the connection trying to read or write to 8 drives though one cable.

in your use case both options are less than desirable but esata (if done correctly) could be faster. USB3 will probably be fine unless you really need that extra gb/s of speed

Edit: It looks like sata port multiplying can exist but its not really supported by manufacturers nor required by the standard so hit and miss as to whether a board can handle it.