I know that drive enclosures are usually frowned upon, due to performance issues, supplying only a single USB cable to feed multiple drives, and the risk of serial number collision.
Has anyone had any positive experience using the TerraMaster enclosures,[1] such as this one?
Does it present each drive with its own serial number?
Does it suffer the same issues as using other multi-drive USB enclosures?
Such a plug-and-play setup would only be used for occasional “simple” backups, for data that isn’t too important, but nice to have on a mirror vdev for later retrieval.
This is not to be confused with the “F” series, which are actual mini NAS servers. ↩︎
I did some test initial testing with a D8 Hybrid for that scenario of secondary backup. It was on a virtualized Truenas Electric Eel under Proxmox.
If I remember correctly, I was able to see the drive serial numbers.
I got some problem with a 3x4TB raidz1 pool with some possible corruption, probably because of the usb connection. Scrub did not find any problem but the pool was unhealth and the replication stopped.
A single disk stripe pool was working better but again, very limited testing.
I want to try again with a dedicated secondary Truenas machine so I’m not limited by VM and usb passthrough. Just need to finish moving all my service to Proxmox so I can repurpose one of my mini pc.
My goal is to have a machine that could just wake up, pull the data via zfs replication and shutdown after.
