What is better for DIY NAS: bunch of USB 3.0 drives or bunch of SATA drives?

7800

Honorable
Nov 1, 2016
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Took advantage of a recent sale and got myself 6x 4TB portable drives. I checked, it can come apart and it's plain SATA drives with USB adapter. Now I would like to make a quick NAS box with RAID 5 and I was wondering what is better: ITX or something very small with USB 3.0 hub and keep all on USB and change setting so it's not removable drive. Or buy a motherboard with at least 6 SATA ports?
 
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G
USB, even USB3, will give you much worse performance, because the interface has all sorts of overhead. Direct SATA is far superior.

BTW, Raid-6 might be something to look into. Gives you dual redundancy. Rebuilding an array of 4TB drives takes a LONG time (about a day), so the risk of a second failure is very real.

BTRFS or RAiD-Z are other options, but maybe a bit more complicated to setup. Does give checksum assurance, though.

Tim K

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Dec 11, 2013
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My gut preference would be to use straight SATA and avoid overhead from the USB->SATA.... aesthetically, that will also save you having half a dozen external power adapters plugged in for all those drives.

I might strongly recommend against RAID-5, however, in favor of RAID 1+0. Given the size of the drives, RAID-5 is somewhat outdated and doesn't greatly increase the chances of successful recovery.
 

7800

Honorable
Nov 1, 2016
5
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10,510
2.5" hard drives don't need extra power so there would only be one power adapter for the USB hub but yeah straight SATA is probably better.

I have 6x 4TB. In RAID 5, I would have 20TB plus 4TB for parity. With 0+1 I'd only have 12TB. It'd probably help if I mentioned what I'd be using NAS for. It'd be mostly for downloaded video and digital copies (all legal) so I could watch em anywhere. It will not be used as backup for important stuff, those are done separately to 2 different portable drives.

There is another RAID similar to RAID 5 that uses 2 drives for recovery: RAID 6 but not many cheap motherboard supports this. There's also RAID-Z which is a variation of RAID 5 with improved performance and less chance of error due to crash during parity computation.

A lot of specialized variations aren't found on motherboard unfortunately, it's mostly software RAID.

One thing for sure, I can't suggest straight up RAID 0 at all, if one drive goes down the whole array loses data and no chance of recovery.
 
G

Guest

Guest
USB, even USB3, will give you much worse performance, because the interface has all sorts of overhead. Direct SATA is far superior.

BTW, Raid-6 might be something to look into. Gives you dual redundancy. Rebuilding an array of 4TB drives takes a LONG time (about a day), so the risk of a second failure is very real.

BTRFS or RAiD-Z are other options, but maybe a bit more complicated to setup. Does give checksum assurance, though.
 
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