I’ve pretty much maxed out my SATA ports on my media server. Instead of rebuilding the entire server I was thinking it would be easier to get a USB3.0 or eSATA enclosure to add some more drives.
I don’t have USB3.1 on the motherboard but the 5/6gbps that I’d get from USB3.0/eSATA should be fast enough, right? It should outpace the read/write speed of the HDDs anyway, I would think.
Anyway… has anyone done this? Pitfalls? How well did it work?
Thanks!
It will certainly work but the typical “desktop” disks aren’t really engineered for the kind of 24/7 operation that is my PMS box. A succession of disk failures caused several library rebuilds before ditching it and going with hardware RAID and “NAS” disks.
This was part of my evolution. Stepping from USB attached storage all the way up to NAS. You should be good on speeds. I’ve seen people run worse and still perform.
Unless my math is wrong, most NAS devices run at 1gbps max based on both the interface they have and the card in the server.
I use SAS 7200 RPM disks with 6-12Gbps interface in an external JBOD enclosure. Get 4K sector size disks if you can afford them.
