[aftbit]

Neat blog! I was intrigued by this bullet point mentioned in passing:

>my four hard drive USB 3.2 ZFS raidz2 array with four 24 TB drives

Can you speak more about this? Which USB array did you choose? How well does it work? I've been slowly planning a transition away from my power-hungry surplus enterprise gear in the 19" rack towards a smaller, quieter, lower power setup ... but storage is the real kicker right now. I have a 12x18TB array in raidz2 built into a 1U NAS case, and I just can't quite figure out a better way to package something like that. I would need three USB arrays if I want to reuse the existing drives, which I think I do given how expensive storage is today.

[dllu]

It's an Orico 9948C3 with four Seagate Barracuda 24TB drives. They were on sale last year [1].

Unfortunately, the enclosure doesn't work super well on Linux. There is a weird bug where the drives don't enumerate when I boot up my computer. This happens on both my x86_64 AMD machine running Linux, and on the DGX Spark. The solution is... simply power cycle the enclosure a couple of times by toggling the power button on it and then it works. Once all four drives show up in lsblk, I can `sudo zfs import ...` manually. This is really gross and annoying. Replacing the USB cable, flipping the USB-C cable 180 degrees, hot plugging it, etc, all didn't work, both on the DGX Spark and the other Linux machine. I've also read reports of it being unstable in UAS mode on Linux but I haven't found a big difference in stability between enabling UAS or falling back to usb-storage.

Once it starts up correctly though, the drives are fast. I store my huge amount of 100 megapixel photos on it.

The Seagate Barracudas are helium-filled HAMR/CMR drives and are apparently rebranded/binned Exos drives. They aren't rated for 24/7 use but then neither are the refurbished Exos drives.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/1p29pm8/hdd_...

[aftbit]

Yeah... that's been my past experience with USB docks, at least any with more than one slot. I've never had great luck with them. "Can recover from power outage without being touched" is a key requirement for my NAS so I'll give that one a pass and stick with my "SATA drives directly attached to a SAS controller" strategy for now. Thanks for the reply.

As for the 24/7 use, yeah so be it. The I in RAID stands for Inexpensive. If they fail after 10 years at 24/7, so be it. I have drive level redundancy and frequent offsite backups of anything critical.

[jauntywundrkind]

It's absolutely the stupidest solution, but SwitchBot Bot is a home-automation button pusher. They are quite cheap on ebay (especially compared to the price of hard drives) but still a face-meltingly stupid problem to have. https://us.switch-bot.com/products/switchbot-bot

I have quite a mix of 2x and 4x drive enclosures, and generally I don't notice anything particularly odd about them? Some enclosures have degraded smart or power management capabilities though. I really wish I'd noticed at the time & sent those ones back! What a waste! My favorite are some dual slot HighPoint toaster-style ones that have independent USB connections per drive, which rocks, but these are so rare & I almost never take advantage of it (replug on drive into a different mini-pc).