I’m just curious for the people using external USB enclosures which they are using and that the pros and cons were for them? There are a number of 2, 3, 4, 5 and even 6 bay HDD enclousures on Amazon, but are they any good and are there any SNOs using them?
Tangential thoughts are welcome.
I’ve been utilizing fantec 4 bay with 12TB WD RED disks…
Easy, cheap, works…
But you should be aware that generally a SATA connected disk should be more stable…
I am using an interal expansion card. 4 SATA ports on an PCIe slot. The ports are sharing bandwidth so I wouldn’t use all 4 at the same time. I have chosen 4 ports to be able to migrate storage nodes later on.
@mike isn’t a single 12tb WD red around £400 / $500 each? Are you running nearly 50TBs of storage space?
@littleskunk What expansion card are you using? I have a spare LSI 1050 that I was thinking of using in a new build, do you have something similar?
Just no name from china. Here is an example how it looks like: https://www.ebay.de/itm/4-Port-PCI-e-auf-SATA3-0-HUB-PCI-Express-Erweiterungskartenadapter-6-Gbit/124255176775
One card cost about 13€. Downside is you have to wait for shipping. Take one with a heat sink and make sure that it is not PCIe x1 1.0 or something slow like that. The number of ports doesn’t matter so much. Important is the how much bandwidth the PCIe connection to you mainboard will have. The ports have so share that.
I shuck them… WD Elements at ~ 200€.
In total I have about 40TB available to Storj on multiple locations.
some of the external disk enclosures come with both usb and esata…
i duno what the added cost is, but i doubt it’s anything meaningful, ofc it does require your computer to have esata or use an esata expander card or such to connect to it…
even if i was planning on setting up a usb run setup using external enclosures then i would strongly consider the enclosures with the esata support… simply so that if i do have some of those weird usb issues, then i could switch to esata without having to go through a lot of trouble to get there…
one thing to note tho, is that not all esata expander cards are compatible with all esata enclosures… or something like that… @kevink ran into that problem, and ended up buying another esata card to get his enclosure working.
usb is made to be disconnected and reconnected, its a feature in the protocol… so not really the best choice for 24/7 storage… so i avoid if possible, ofc it might work beautifully…
i ran my first storagenode on wifi for 3 months without an issue… ofc took a bit of tinkering to get the wifi stable… but still it worked great… wouldn’t recommend it… i would suspect usb will be the same… for 90% of people it might work flawlessly… but then there is the last 10%
+1. You copy pasted my thoughts 
BTW Fantec does support both USB and esata.
Reason why I’m not using esata is that my host computer is Intel NUC and Apple Mac mini. Neither supports it.
However, I’ve been fortunate and is among the 90%. Been running this setup for years and no issues. 