New Build Questions


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Greetings, all!

 

Planning on setting up a second unRAID server and want to bounce an idea off you folks as far as feasibility goes. 

Would unRAID see drives in an eSATA enclosure as individual drives? My plan is to buy a low power PC with PCIe slots and a couple of these:

https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115122&_ga=2.144343478.2043191018.1533733316-1588329800.1533733316

(HighPoint RocketRAID 644L PCI-Express 2.0 x4 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) RAID Controller Card)

 

Then I'd attach these:

https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAYY6YF5629&_ga=2.181046820.2043191018.1533733316-1588329800.1533733316

(SYBA SY-ENC50104 4 Bay 3.5" SATA III HDD NON-RAID Enclosure)

 

Each one would have four drives, the card supports four eSATA connections, so it's pretty easy to expand.

 

Would this work as I'm thinking it should?

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Work possibly, but likely to give issues, SATA port multipliers are not recommended, if you need to use external use a SAS HBA connected to a SAS enclosure.

I've been using external enclosures with port multiplier cards for nine years now. Six or seven using unRAID.   They have always been solid in my setups over the years. Previously Two WHS setups and currently three unRAID setups.     

 

 

I currently have nine port multiplier enclosures in use. With forty three drives in them between my three unRAID setups. They have been Rock solid all these years.    The only issue is slower parity checks with all the drives I have on port multiplier cards. So my parity checks will only average between 25MB/s and 35MB/s depending which unRAID setup I'm using. 

 

I initially started using port multiplier enclosures in 2009 with my Windows Home Server. And when I switched to using unRAID, I continued using those enclosures. And everytime I added a new unRaID setup, I just used those enclosures since I have so many lying around.

 

All my unRaID setups use them along with four or five drives in the main computer case. Only those drives are hooked directly to SATA ports on the MB. while the enclosures are connected to port multiplier cards I added to each system.

 

So while using port multiplier enclosures is not ideal, it will certainly work without any issues.

I can play back my UHD BD MKV rips with zero issues. And of course my lower bit rate 2K BD ISO rips have never had any issues in nine years, streaming from the port multiplier enclosures.

 

Sent from my Galaxy S8 using Tapatalk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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10 hours ago, aaronwt said:

So while using port multiplier enclosures is not ideal, it will certainly work without any issues.

IMO the bad performance wold be reason enough not to use them, but glad it's working for you, still over the years I've found many users here with port multiplier related issues, so my recommendation to not use them stands.

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  • 10 months later...

This weekend I added two more external enclosures to my two smaller unRAID setups. Now I have eleven external enclosures in use. I recently purchased a couple dozen of the old 4TB Seagate NAS drives, model ST4000NC001, for under $65 each. So I'm in the process of adding a second parity drive and will replace all my 2TB drives with 4TB drives. As well as add three new 4TB drives to the arrays. That should give me over 40TB more to my unRAID1a(35TB prior to weekend) and unRAID 3(45TB prior to weekend) setups. Since they are both over 98% capacity right now. These UHD BD rips have been really filling up my storage.

 

53TB unRAID2--49TB unRAID3--43TB unRAID1a

Edited by aaronwt
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