Basic hardware - Dell R210 II, 4x Seagate NAS 3TB, Mediasonic ProBox 4-bay enclosure
I've been running OpenMediaVault for about a year using an older Dell Optiplex 755 with 2 2TB Seagate NAS drives and two other random disks. The NAS drives are in a mirror, the others are just on their own.
I'm replacing all of the disks with 3TB Seagate NAS drives in this enclosure and switching to a Dell R210 II. I plan to run RAID-Z2. The array will host media, an ESXi datastore, and act as a backup target for two laptops. Irreplaceable data is backed up to an external drive and cloud storage. I will be using LACP across the two inbuilt Intel NICs.
I'm trying to figure out the best way to connect this enclosure to the new server and I've come up with a few options.
Option 1: eSATA using an ASM1061 based addon card. Currently using this card in the Optiplex. Works well
Option 2: USB 3.0 using a yet undetermined addon card.
Option 3: eSATA similar to above, but put two of the drives inside the R210 chassis.
My concern with Option 1 is more about resilvering speed should a drive fail. While the card is SATA III, the enclosure is only SATA II. Option 2 gives me 5gbps between the enclosure and the server, but I'm not sure about USB 3.0 support and whether or not that's a good idea with ZFS.
Option 3 is an OK solution, but I lose the ability to easily swap out a failed drive if that drive happens to be in the server itself. The R210 has two fixed mounting positions not available from outside the chassis. These drives may also run slightly warmer as the enclosure is fan cooled.
Raw performance isn't a huge concern. I imagine I could still saturate 1gig with Option 1. While I will be running LACP, it's unlikely I'll have two separate streams pulling full load.
Thoughts and advice are appreciated!
I've been running OpenMediaVault for about a year using an older Dell Optiplex 755 with 2 2TB Seagate NAS drives and two other random disks. The NAS drives are in a mirror, the others are just on their own.
I'm replacing all of the disks with 3TB Seagate NAS drives in this enclosure and switching to a Dell R210 II. I plan to run RAID-Z2. The array will host media, an ESXi datastore, and act as a backup target for two laptops. Irreplaceable data is backed up to an external drive and cloud storage. I will be using LACP across the two inbuilt Intel NICs.
I'm trying to figure out the best way to connect this enclosure to the new server and I've come up with a few options.
Option 1: eSATA using an ASM1061 based addon card. Currently using this card in the Optiplex. Works well
Option 2: USB 3.0 using a yet undetermined addon card.
Option 3: eSATA similar to above, but put two of the drives inside the R210 chassis.
My concern with Option 1 is more about resilvering speed should a drive fail. While the card is SATA III, the enclosure is only SATA II. Option 2 gives me 5gbps between the enclosure and the server, but I'm not sure about USB 3.0 support and whether or not that's a good idea with ZFS.
Option 3 is an OK solution, but I lose the ability to easily swap out a failed drive if that drive happens to be in the server itself. The R210 has two fixed mounting positions not available from outside the chassis. These drives may also run slightly warmer as the enclosure is fan cooled.
Raw performance isn't a huge concern. I imagine I could still saturate 1gig with Option 1. While I will be running LACP, it's unlikely I'll have two separate streams pulling full load.
Thoughts and advice are appreciated!