Thunderbolt 3 JBOD expnsion

TrueNAS General
,
1

Hi - after using supermicro systems for past 10 years or so on Truenas Core (and freenas) I decided to move to Truenas Scale and consumer/enthusiast hardware to reduce the carbon footprint and electricity bill. I have built a system with combination of OWC Thunderbolt 3 JBODs:

  1. 3x OWC ThunderBay 8
  2. 3x OWC ThunderBay Flex 8

One for the SATA drives and another one for SAS drives, connected to mini Intel PC with USB4 ports. It has worked great with my testing and speed etc.

I wanted to get some feedback if its a good idea to use Thunderbolt 3 JBOD’s with Truenas Scale?

Also the reason I am asking this question is based on the reason taht my kid acidentaly turned off the mini pc while scrub was going on and when I restarted the system one of the disk was removed from one of the VDEVS with the message “One or more devices has been removed by the administrator.”.

So I am getting worried if I made the right decision with the my design.

2

Well. It’s not something I would’ve done :slight_smile:

The more usual way would be to use SAS external jbods. Perhaps from super micro.

FWIW, the thundrt bay uses JMicron 585 sata 5 port controller. Which may mean a port multiplier too.

https://www.jmicron.com/products/list/2

I have no idea how reliable the thunderbolt support in Linux/scale is.

1 Like
3

Supermicro’s are nice and I have bunch of them but they are loud and require cooling and I am trying to get away for it without locking into Synology or Qnap.