Array on one 10x drive bay USB 3.1 box

[Jakob Muxoll]

Hi y'all

I'm considering moving to UnRaid from a Mac mini currently running as server.

I'm currently using a USB 3.1 IcyBox tower, which has 10 drive bays, presenting all installed drives individually to the host on a single USB 3.1 connection. The host is currently the Mac mini. The mini runs macOS, is on 24/7, and I have three JBOD arrays set up via macOS Disk Utility. All arrays are shared to my network, using one (4x4TB=16TB JBOD) as a Time Machine backup array for three Macs, the second array (2x1TB=2TB JBOD) as a 24/7 iTunes movie/music setup to stream to iPhones, iPads, AppleTV's and the three Macs over Home Sharing. The third (2x2TB=4TB JBOD) as archive for my finished photography files (I'm a pro-photographer). This setup has been running without any issues for three years, no issues with read/write speeds or USB disconnects.

 

Now - Turns out no one in the house streams anything from the server like I had expected. We always just stream directly from Apple, or put on DVD's. I figure I could do without that Mac mini, and sell it off for some extra cash, as we're clearly not using its iTunes home sharing at all. That brings me to UnRaid.

I've got a four year old HP mini PC with USB 3.0/3.1 ports in the back, and my plan is to max out its RAM, and use it for UnRaid with the 10-bay USB tower from above connected to a single USB port. The 10-bay tower would be filled with drives of various capacities - 4x4TB, 2x2TB and 2x1TB. I would then install a 120GB SSD in the HP's internal SATA bay and use that as cache. I would be using the whole thing for TM backups, general not-frequently-used stuff, and my photography archive.

 

I'm interested in your thoughts on this. That 10-bay tower has been rock solid with the Mac mini, so I wouldn't expect issues from the tower itself.

 

Thanks

Edited October 24, 2019 by Jakob Muxoll
Typos...

[trurl]

USB, though allowed, is not recommended for the parity array or cache pool due to unreliable connections and other complications with some implementations.

[Jakob Muxoll]

Ok, I thought that might be the case. Thanks for replying.