(slightly OT) Recommendations for JBOD enclosures for Mac?

[Björn Kahl]

Dear all,

I am seeking advise on affordable 2-6 bay 3"5 hard disk enclosures to
use with MacZFS.

Since it is for MacZFS, I do not need any fancy RAID features, just
plain JBOD ("Just a Bunch Of Disks").

Here is what I like to have, anyone knows of devices (available in or
shipable to Europe) that can do this:

- 2, 4 or 6 bays for SATA 3"5 harddisks

- Firewire 800 connection with internal daisy-chain (i.e. only one
cable goes to the host, and all 2, 4 or 6 drives show up)

or

- eSATA connection which supports port-multiplier

or

- USB2, such that all disks are individually accessible

or

- Thunderbolt connection, again one cable all 2, 4 or 6 drives
individually accessible.

Since I intend to run this mostly on a 2010 MacbookPro and
occasionally on a Linux box, any candidate device must fulfill the
following boolean condition:

( Firewire OR Thunderbolt ) AND ( USB OR eSATA ) == TRUE

with Firewire, Thunderbold, USB, eSATA being TRUE iff the device has
the respective connection option as described in above list.


Sofar, I tried various devices from Raidsonic (their ICY ... brand),
and all failed soon or later with random bus drops, silent data
corruption or simply blowing up the controller. I got data corruption
and bus drops independent of the use of USB or Firewire.

My current best pick is a FanTEC 4 bay enclosure, but this
unfortunately has ony USB and eSATA, making it a really slow think on
the Mac when using raidz or two-way mirroring.


Best regards

Björn

--
| Bjoern Kahl +++ Siegburg +++ Germany |
| "googlelogin@-my-domain-" +++ www.bjoern-kahl.de |
| Languages: German, English, Ancient Latin (a bit :-)) |

[Boyd Waters]

I have had good results with the Addonics 4-bay enclosures with the
eSATA port multiplier, and even better the (discontinued) "Venus T4S",
which I got from NewEgg…

I think that these products are OEM'd and sold under different names,
depending on where in the world you purchase them.


http://www.addonics.com/products/mst.php
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817332013

[Developer]

Yeah Addonics products are great, I have about 10 of them. I usually just buy the cards though and build my own bays and power supplies. I then attach them with ESATA to legacy (they come with USB 3.0 as well), and those are then attached to Sonnet Tech Thunderbolt boxes with ESATA cards as well. I really like the Thunderbolt options, as I can move these systems around very easily.

Jason

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[Boyd Waters]

Back in 2007-2009, I had some compatibility issues with eSATA
connections to an eSATA Port Multiplier.

Hardware purchased after 2011 should behave correctly with a port
multiplier, but it doesn't hurt to know for sure.

I used my enclosures with MacZFS back in 2008-2010 with my Mac Pro and
some very cheap Sil3132 PCIe eSATA adapters; they can be had for $15
new.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124004

However, when I used these same controllers in my NAS server (I built
a PC for this), they could not keep up. So I had to re-wire my setup
such that the Sil3132 controllers each only had one disk to manage.
Silly but cheap.

(
here's a nickel, kid. buy yourself a real SATA controller:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816117157

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-06-24/
)

[Jason]

Yeah that happens. I have been using Addonics since around then without issues, but they are $100 per for 5 drive connector. You can daisy chain 25 drives this way and connect to a Sonnet Tech 4 ESATA port card for 100 drives. I wouldn't recommend it unless your main connection is Thunderbolt though. ;)

Ahhhh, don't ya just love mad science!!!!??????

Jason
Sent from my iPhone

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[Raoul Callaghan]

Over the years, I have used:

2 x Acard 6885M PATA HBAs... 

Worked wonderfully on a PowerPC G4 DA mobo that was transplanted into an Apple Network Server 500 case.

the PATA cabling wasn't a fun experience, but hey... I learnt a lot.

I then moved onto a Mac Mini in the ANS500.

I ripped out the mini-PCIe wireless card and used the miniPCIe to PCIe adapter cable for a Silicon Sil3132 two port HBA.

This had two Addonics PMs connected to it, to drive the 10 SATA disks I bought over time.

Not the fastest kid on the block but I was only needing storage.

Last year, the ANS500 got guttered again and I whacked in a HacPro.

I had an old Intel X48BT2 mobo lying around so I got a Xeon 4core CPU and 16GB DDR3 RAM.

I used a spare Thermaltake 1500w CPU from my old nVidia SLI days which powers everything nicely.

And last month I just bought HighPoint's RocketRAID 2744 HBA. to replace the 2 Addonics PMs

Running 10.7.3 (server) at the moment and using the LiberateAFS hook.

I've got one pool configured, using 5 sets of RAIDz1 (3 disks per set)

I knew I had to use the onboard SATA controller because the 2744 is not compatible with all my drives. (which I knew)

I got 3 sets using 1TB disks and 2 sets using 2TB disks.

What I'm not sure about is the Advanced Format issue with the 2TB disks. I'm not noticing any issues so I'm assuming they're not AF disks.

Needless to say, this thing is quick.

Gigabit network is now the bottleneck as I constantly get around 85-100MB/s read/write via AFP.

NFS gives good speed as well, but is a PITA with my partner's laptop and connecting to the iTunes and iPhoto library for her didn't always work well, but AFP is fine.

The 2744 HBA is a full 16 lane slot card. I'm not using any of the RAID capabilities either.  I didn't even have to configure it as JBOD (confirmed this with HP too) because with OSX, it just recognises drives directly by default.  (OSX doesn't use the BIOS of the card either, it's all kext based)

I wanted this card primarily for it's capability to drive 16 SAS/SATA drives, directly from one HBA.  It can drive many more SAS drives via expansion chassis but this is overkill for me.

I'm very happy with my setup atm, and have future-proofed myself if I move to an all SSD option (10Gbit Ethernet as standard on mobos isn't too far away either)

Cheers,

Raoul

--

[Björn Kahl]

Dear all,

many thanks for all the different suggestions, I will definitively
look into some of them in more detail.

Since my Mac is a Mac/book/Pro, as I wrote, I can't use those
suggestions that involve adding an eSATA card to the machine. (The
eSATA connectivity was aimed at the second box (PC running Linux) that
will occasionally access thee pool.)

For the Mac/book/Pro I am limited to USB (which is only USB-2.0 and
really slow), Firewire-800 or Thunderbolt.

I couldn't find any affordable multi-bay Thunderbold enclosures doing
JBOD; of course there are some really expensive ones that do hardware
RAID, but hey, this is for ZFS, so no RAID needed.


I found this Thunderbold -> eSATA converter:

http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-eSATA-Hub-controller-eSATA-300/dp/B007SYXER2

but according to a review on the German amazon.de page, it does not
support Port Multiplier, rendering it useless for eSATA JBOD
enclosures. Additionally, it is not clear to me, if I could connect
and disconnect this hub without rebooting. I usually reboot my Macbook
only once every 8-10 weeks ...


@ Jason:

Thanks for the pointer to Sonnet, I was not aware of these devices.
They are quite expensive and for the time being out of budget, but I
will keep an eye on them.

Do you know if the Sonnet Thunderbolt -> eSATA adapter "Echo Express
SE eSATA Pro 4-Port" (seems to be a bundle of the Echo Express SE
PCIe Expansion Chassis for PCIe Cards and the Tempo™ SATA Pro 6Gb
4-Port eSATA host controller) supports hotplug? The web page says it
supports eSATA hotplug under Mac OSX, but does this mean I can
disconnect and reconnect the eSATA cable(s), or does it mean I can
disconnect and reconnect to Thunderbold cable at runtime? I need the
later (Thunderbold (dis)connect at runtime, without reboot).


@ Boyd:

The Addonics enclosures look promising, I especially like the modular
concept of different connector modules. And they are much more in my
budget than the Sonnet thing with its 600 something. Of course, I
would still need some eSATA conectivity on the Macbook or again use
USB.


Best regards

Björn


Am 02.10.12 10:13, schrieb Björn Kahl:
>
> Dear all,

>
> Here is what I like to have, anyone knows of devices (available in or
> shipable to Europe) that can do this:
>
> - 2, 4 or 6 bays for SATA 3"5 harddisks
>
> - Firewire 800 connection with internal daisy-chain (i.e. only one
> cable goes to the host, and all 2, 4 or 6 drives show up)
>
> or
>
> - eSATA connection which supports port-multiplier
>
> or
>
> - USB2, such that all disks are individually accessible
>
> or
>
> - Thunderbolt connection, again one cable all 2, 4 or 6 drives
> individually accessible.
>
> Since I intend to run this mostly on a 2010 MacbookPro and
> occasionally on a Linux box, any candidate device must fulfill the
> following boolean condition:
>
> ( Firewire OR Thunderbolt ) AND ( USB OR eSATA ) == TRUE
>
> with Firewire, Thunderbold, USB, eSATA being TRUE iff the device has
> the respective connection option as described in above list.

[Jason]

You can build the enclosure darn cheap.

Yes the Thunderbolt is hot plug aware as long as the drives and connector keep power you should be fine. Now thaw card used may have issues....;)

You can go the Thunderbolt express card route, a lot cheaper and works well from Sonnet Tech.

Here's to hoping more companies come online for similar products, but Intel is the real problem with the cost associated.

Jason
Sent from my iPhone