Enclosure Drive vs. Separate NAS

[octalsnroses]

First off: I don't even have Unraid installed anywhere yet, so this may be premature, but I currently have 5 Western Digital Passport portable USB 3.0 external drives (3TB, 3TB, 2TB, 2TB, 500GB) connected to an AC powered 8-port USB Hub connected all connected to my Intel NUC. I also have a 12TB Western Digital Elements Drive that I was using to manually copy over all of my data (this was before I knew about rsync, Duplicati, etc). My Intel NUC uses a 250GB SSD which I'll use as a cache drive. My Unraid Boot Drive will be a 32GB USB-C Flash Drive. 

 

I have a few questions:

1. Are there any downsides to shucking all of my portable hard drives and putting them into a 4-5 bay enclosure (like this one). I don't mind my current setup except it's kind of ugly. I feel like moving them to an external enclosure will increase my transfer speeds and potentially be better for energy consumption. Is this accurate? Also, is there a chance the drives could go to sleep and lose the connection? Has anyone had success or failure with that Sabrent enclosure specifically or recommend something similar?
2. Does anyone have good ideas for how to migrate my whole setup to using Unraid? Each of the hard drives is formatted to EXT4, and the Intel NUC is running bare metal Ubuntu. Should I back up everything to my 12TB drive with Duplicati before formatting my drives? (I assume I'll have to reformat my drives when installing Unraid).
3. If I use the 12TB Drive, would I only be able to use a parity drive if I got another 12TB drive?
4. I worry about stability. My Intel NUC is a little on the fritz, but I love having a tiny server to play with. I also know if my pet project dies, so does all my data. Does it make sense to have something like a very basic Synology with my data backing up to something like Backblaze, and then use Unraid on the NUC and mount the Synology with SMB or NFS? (or even Ethernet if possible). Is this a common setup? My understanding is with Synology that you pretty much have to use RAID, and if I wanted any amount of parity, I would need to have drives all of the same size. It seems like Unraid is going to be way less expensive overall, but I don't know what to do. Synology DS220+ is about the same price as the Sabrent 5-Bay enclosure, so maybe it makes sense to do this? Do they play nicely?
5. I've heard great things about ZFS (and some good things about BTRFS). If I were to use a NAS separately for files, would I have to keep it all as one consistent file system? What is the most reliable setup?

 

I should also mention that cost, power consumption, and sound are my main concerns.

[JonathanM]

USB connections to parity drive arrays are not recommended for multiple reasons, mainly the lack of stability. USB tends to drop and reconnect for no apparent reason, and normally that's just handled relatively seamlessly, but for Unraid all the drives in the parity array must maintain a rock solid connection, if a drive drops even temporarily it will be disabled.

 

I don't think a NUC is a good candidate for what you are trying to do, unless you can figure out a way other than USB to connect the array drives.

[ArturK]

4 hours ago, JonathanM said:

USB connections to parity drive arrays are not recommended for multiple reasons, mainly the lack of stability. USB tends to drop and reconnect for no apparent reason, and normally that's just handled relatively seamlessly, but for Unraid all the drives in the parity array must maintain a rock solid connection, if a drive drops even temporarily it will be disabled.

 

I don't think a NUC is a good candidate for what you are trying to do, unless you can figure out a way other than USB to connect the array drives.

 

This may be true maybe 10 or 15 years years ago. Nowadays it simply not true. USB is stable, fast and reliable. It may be as reliable as SATA, provided You use reliable components (same applies to sata or scsci cards). This is yet another connection type, not that different from SATA in terms of reliability, in some cases better. I've had bunch of drives connected to my old Dell T20 both with SATA and USB (parity being connected via USB), worked for last 5 years quite heavy workload 24/7 without any single failure (unless when mechanically disk failed, and in sata port btw). No even single parity check error over all that years.

 

Recently migrated this setup because I wanted reduce overall power consumption to this:

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/134126999249

 

(this is actually comparable in terms of performance to my old Dell's xeon 1225, only marginally slower in passmark) with TDP 10W instead of 80W. You can have something much much faster if You need, and say, You are okay with 15W TDP: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html#scatter-cpu

 

and this

 

https://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-SATA-Hard-Drive-Enclosure/dp/B078YQHWYW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1GXVLOSGI8CQQ&keywords=mediasonic+usb+3.1&qid=1653968093&sprefix=mediasonic+usb+3.1%2Caps%2C172&sr=8-1

 

with 4 16TB segate exos. Again, so far I'm very happy with the setup. Absolutely no problems. And I have 46TB NAS averaging 42W power consumption.

 

(same enclosure is sold rebranded by IcyBox or Fantech).

 

Provided - this is my home nas. It's not enteprise, mission critical system on which critical systems may depend. Good enough and cheap enough and future proof.

 

Edited May 31, 2022 by ArturK

[trurl]

I don't doubt some specific implementations may work well, but in addition to connections dropping, some implementations don't even allow Unraid to identify drives consistently or even uniquely. Also can present disks with nonstandard sizes so can't be assigned as parity. Maybe other problems I don't recall but have definitely seen these on this forum recently. 

[m00nman]

Just to confirm what @trurl said. I just bought 2x Yottamaster 10Gbit/s 5 bay enclosures thinking I could reduce power usage by using the enclosures + a modent laptop. I reduced idle power usage by around 40W, however the issue with the enclosures was that it was contstantly substituting enclosure serial number for some drives' serial numbers at random every boot. So the serial number for drives would change randomly ever boot which caused unraid to think the drives are missing. After messing around for 2 days I returned the enclosures today. The speed was great. If UNRAID used PARTUUID instead of identifying  the disks by-id it would likely have worked, but unraid does it by-id so it's a no go, unfortunately. I guess PARTUUID is just a partition id, so it may not be feasable.

 

Edited November 5, 2023 by m00nman