Here’s the box test thread if you’re curious. 😊
I thought about it, but it typically requires extra PCIe cards that I can’t rely on as there’s no space in one of the machines and no PCIe slots in the other. That’s why I did a careful search till I stumbled upon this particular enclosure and then I tested one with ZFS for over a week before buying the rest.
That was the cheapest option. 🤭
Two machines. A main server/workstation and a small off-site backup machine that runs the same services but hass less compute and RAM.
And now it no longer shows up.
Quite possibly. That said the one I linked is CUI, not a noname. It’s even got an MTBF of 300K hours in its datasheet. There are cheaper ones. 😅 And more expensive ones.
I see a number of dual-output PSUs on Mouser that will probably fit well if this goes. For example.
Yeah, I googled that IC, no hits. 😂
Done. Says 150W on it. Not sure if it’s real. If it is, then it’s plenty overrated for the hardware which should bode well for its longevity. Especially given that the caps are Chengx across the board so definitely not the best. :D Can you tell anything interesting about it from the pics?
Finally happy with the testing. I’ll disassemble it sometime today.
440 pounds is insane, agreed. 😂
Yeah I get it then. So it depends on whether one has PCIe slots available, 3.5" bays in the case, whether they can change the case if full, etc. It could totally make sense to do under certain conditions. In my case there’s no space in my PC case and I don’t have any PCIe slots left. In addition, I have an off-site machine that’s an USFF PC which has no PCIe slots or SATA ports. It’s only available connectivity is USB. So in my case USB is what I can work with. As long as it isn’t exorbitantly expensive, a USB solution has flexibility in this regard. I would have never paid 440 pounds for this if that was the price. I’d have stayed with single enclosures nailed to a wooden board and added a USB hub. 🥹 Which is how they used to be:
Please elaborate.
What I parse that you’re talking about is a PCIe SATA host controller and a box for the disks. Prior to landing on the OWC, I looked at QNAP’s 4-bay solution that does this - the TL-D400S. That can be found around the $300 mark. The OWC is $220 from the source. That’s roughly equivalent to 4 of StarTech’s enclosures that use the same chipset.
I wasn’t able to reach it for a top-down visual through the back and so I don’t have pics of it other than the side view already attached. I’ll try disassembling it further sometime today, once the ZFS scrub completes.
Luckily, the PSU is connected to the main board via standard molex. If the built-in one blows up, you could replace it with any ATX PSU, large, small (FlexATX, etc), or one of those power bricks that spit out a 5V/12V molex. Whether you can stuff it in or not.
I was wondering what would be better for discoverability, to write this in a blog post, on GitHub, then link it here, or to just write it here. Turns out Google’s crawling Lemmy quite actively. This shows up within the first 10-15 results for “USB DAS ZFS”:
It appears that Lemmy is already a good place for writing stuff like this. ☺️
5950X, 64GB
It’s a multipurpose machine, desktop workstation, games, running various servers.
Here’s a visual inspiration: