Homelab: 4 or 5 bay ssd enclosure for DAS with RAID Capabilities?!

[crzp]

Hey everyone,

currently i'm running my homelab with proxmox on a gigabyte brix 4800u unit with an internal 500GB NVMe drive.

Everything's running fine and smoothly. This thing has more than enough power for what i want it to do and it sucks only ~10-11Watts from the wall.

 

Now, for storage i thought it would be easy to directly attach a few ssds (that are in an enclosure of some sort) via usb-c and be done with it.

As it turns out, i was wrong. 

There are so few options, and the information about these things is sparse, at best.

I am stuck at this point, as i cant decide what is good or bad for my use case,

and i was hoping for help from you guys.

 

 

What i want to do:

I have a few spare Crucial MX500 1TB SSDs and i want to use them to expand my storage on this little box.

I was thinking some 4 or 5 bay ssd enclosure, preferably with USB 3.2 Gen2 Type C to get the best possible bandwith the Brix supports.

I want to be able to use raid, probably raid-5.

If possible i would like it to be for 2.5" drives only, so that it is slim.

 

Now my question is:

What to buy and use? 

I saw stuff like the Sabrent Docking Station, for ~70€ (~81$)

up to things like ICY BOX External 4-Way USB-C Enclosure for around 190€ (~220$) (and i'm not really sure the 2.5" ssds would fit in there without additional brackets)

 

 

Suggestions, feedback, experiences with that kind of stuff, etc are very welcome.

 

 

PS:

Please excuse my poor english.

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 hours ago, crzp said:

I want to be able to use raid, probably raid-5.

Id do this with zfs in proxmox, not with the enclsoure, it will work better here.

 

And also all usb enclosure normally have a higher issues rate than internal sata, so just warning you.

 

Id probably go with the sabrent enclosure here, seems to be the best option here.

[derr12]

with the price of ssd enclosures these days, its probably cheaper to just grab an old dual or quad core off e-bay and use that with unraid or freenas or something. the expensive part will be getting decent speeds over the network since usb really is a bad interface for a VM storage space,  proxmox as i recall, will let you use NFS shares for datastores.  

 

other option is a sas expander that you can plug right into a controller on your server. those are pretty cheap.  

[crzp]

Thank you both for your answers 

 

On 10/14/2021 at 10:45 PM, derr12 said:

with the price of ssd enclosures these days, its probably cheaper to just grab an old dual or quad core off e-bay and use that with unraid or freenas or something. the expensive part will be getting decent speeds over the network since usb really is a bad interface for a VM storage space,  proxmox as i recall, will let you use NFS shares for datastores.  

 

other option is a sas expander that you can plug right into a controller on your server. those are pretty cheap.  

Sadly i do not have any more space, nor do i want to have an extra machine running just for the storage.

Electricity is expensive in germany.

 

The vm-disks can run off of the internal nvme drive.
The extra storage was supposed to be mounted seperatly into the VMs, for example a data folder for nextcloud.

 

 

On 10/14/2021 at 5:40 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id do this with zfs in proxmox, not with the enclsoure, it will work better here.

 

And also all usb enclosure normally have a higher issues rate than internal sata, so just warning you.

My little home-server is a NUC-like PC, so there's not enough space for more then one internal ssd and thats where an enclosure would come in.

 

On 10/14/2021 at 5:40 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id probably go with the sabrent enclosure here, seems to be the best option here.

Thank you. 

I'll look around a few more days, but if nothing else pops up, i'll give it a go.

In that case i'll keep you guys updated on the progress.