Hello. I'm getting started with Unraid, migrating from headless Windows 10 on the same hardware. Dell XPS 8930 desktop, Intel Core i7-8700, 64GB ram, 1TB NVMe Samsung 970 EVO Plus as system/appdata/domains cache<-array, 250gb SSD Samsung 860 EVO as my data/media cache->array, and 11x 14TB WD white label HDDs shucked from WD easystore (WD140EDFZ-11A0VA0). Three of these HDDs are mounted internally via SATA (2 of which are parity), the rest are in two 4-bay Mediasonic USB 3.1gen2 Enclosures (HF7-SU31C) connected to the two USB 3.1gen2 ports integrated on the motherboard using the ASMedia ASM1142 USB 3.1 Host Controller. I am well aware that USB is not ideal, but it's the hardware I've got and I came to Unraid to unleash my hardware 😁 Plus I've read plenty of reports of folks using these same enclosures on Unraid reliably.

 

I started with the internal drives and just one of the enclosures (parity: 2 internal, array: 1 internal + 4 external). I had the second enclosure connected to another machine and started migrating data. The first 14tb drive took a couple days to move the data, understandable since I had the parity drives setup, didn't realize to enable turbo write, and it's over a 1gbps network.

So I decided to try and speed up the process. I removed the parity drives for the initial migration, I setup a Win11 VM and connected the second enclosure directly and passed the unassigned disks directly to the VM, and am using the VM to copy the data from respective source disks to respective disks on the array via disk shares. I had three simultaneous copy jobs running at about 120MB/s, essentially being EnclosureA,DiskX (NTFS) => EnclosureB,DiskX (xfs) with X being 2,3&4. 

The first time it failed pretty quickly, within an hour or two. I think the USB 3.1gen2 controller fails and disconnects all 8 disks connected whether they're in the array or passed to the VM. At first, I thought it might be due to overheating. It's rare that more than 1 or 2 of the disks in one of these enclosures is spinning simultaneously, and these budget enclosures do leave something to be desired with cooling. So I opened their front covers, got a full size room fan and pointed it directly at the rig, turned it on high, and tried again. It chugged away for quite a bit longer this time but still ended up failing.

Now I'm suspect of the ASMedia ASM1142 USB 3.1 Host Controller. I actually had a lot of similar issues with it on Windows 10 and 11. No problems when running them as JBOD but whenever I tried to setup any sort of array with parity via Storage Spaces or SnapRAID it would fail and disconnecting all drives when writing any significant amount of data to it. After spending way too much time troubleshooting, I found the Microsoft supplied driver for that host controller is garbage. Using another driver as recommended by some VR enthusiasts who were having issues with this same machine and it's USB 3.1 ports for their Oculus headsets (Dell marketed this machine as a "VR ready"), I got it reliably working on Windows, but at this point I was pretty soured on Windows and was ready to try something better for my media server needs.

 

So here we are with Unraid and I'm smitten. it seems like the perfect fit for my hardware and it's the perfect entry point for this stubborn lifelong Windows user to broaden his horizons and now I can't believe I hadn't done it sooner. But as you can imagine my dismay running into the same issues I had with Windows with the USB 3.1 controller and all drives disconnecting during moderate simultaneous use.

I'm hoping for some help deciphering the diagnostics to point me in the right direction. I know I'm sacrificing reliability with USB but I'm hoping to get it as stable as I can. Do I just need to be patient and let Unraid do it's thing, which is typically one disk at a time? Or should I just ditch the integrated USB 3.1/3.2 controller and get a PCIe card, something like the StarTech PEXUSB312C3 with a ASMedia ASM3142 host controller which is hopefully newer, more stable, better supported, etc.

Thanks for your time

 

UPDATE

I know USB isn't recommended, but I wanted to document what I found just in case anyone stumbles on this post with similar issues. I've been wrestling with these issues for years across 3 different operating systems (Win 10, Win 11, unRAID both when disks are in the array and being used as unassigned), and two identical machines (Dell XPS 8930) and it had me at my wits end, but I think I finally figured it out. 

TLDR: Don't plug two 10gbps USB devices into the same PCIe USB 3.1/3.2 host controller. Any USB host controller that uses the PCIe interface, even if it's integrated on your motherboard like my ASMedia ASM1142 is, divide the 10gbps bandwidth between two of the ports. With intensive usage, two 10gbps devices will fight over bandwidth which I believe was causing my host controller to fail. You're better off using two 5gbps USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports or getting separate USB 3.1 Gen 2 controllers.

I just say "10gbps" because it's been called USB 3.1 Gen2, USB 3.2 Gen2, USB 3.2 Gen2x1, and it all just means the same thing.

 

Anyways, I was doing further testing to see if the issue was my ASMedia ASM1142 host controller and decided to try the other 5gbps USB 3.1 Gen1 ports on my machine and everything worked fine. All of those ports are controlled by the Intel USB host controller via the Intel Z360 Chipset and each have their own lane. My Intel Z360 chipset does not support USB 3.1 Gen2 (even though most every other Intel 300 series Coffee Lake chipset does???) so I'm stuck with the integrated ASMedia host controller via PCIe interface.

So I went over to StarTech's website to shop for a new host controller card and some of their 2-port cards list 10gbps/port, some explicitly state the 10gbps is shared, and they even have 4-port cards that have two separate host controller chips, each pair of USB ports sharing 10gbps bandwidth. I chatted with an EXTREMELY helpful product support tech and who went above and beyond to clarify all this for me. I told him my use case and he even tried to talk me out of buying the much more expensive 2 controller card, telling me to just use the integrated controller for one enclosure and a single controller PCIe card for the second. What a guy.

ulixes-diagnostics-20240826-0832.zip

Edited August 30, 20241 yr by grimesbot
fixing minor mistyping and tenses, update

USB not recommended for assigned disks for many reasons