alt Hacker NewsI think it's becoming reasonable to think consumer storage could be a limited number of soldered NVMe and NVMe-over-M.2 slots, complemented by contemporary USB for more expansion. That USB expansion might be some kind of JBOD chassis, whether that is a pile of SATA or additional M.2 drives.
The main problem is having proper translation of device management features, e.g. SMART diagnostics or similar getting back to the host. But from a performance perspective, it seems reasonable to switch to USB once you are multiplexing drives over the same, limited IO channels from the CPU to expand capacity rather than bandwidth.
Once you get out of this smallest consumer expansion scenario, I think NAS takes over as the most sensible architecture for small office/home office settings.
Other SAN variants really only make sense in datacenter architectures where you are trying to optimize for very well-defined server/storage traffic patterns.
Is there any drawback to going towards USB for multiplexed storage inside a desktop PC or NAS chassis too? It feels like the days of RAID cards are over, given the desire for host-managed, software-defined storage abstractions.
Does SAS still have some benefit here?
Replies
As @wtallis already said, a lot of external USB stuff is just unreliable.
Right now I am overlooking my display and seeing 4 different USB-A hubs and 3 different enclosures that I am not sure what to do with (likely can't even sell them, they'd go for like 10-20 EUR and deliveries go for 5 EUR so why bother; I'll likely just dump them at one point). _All_ of them were marketed as 24/7, not needing cooling etc. _All_ of them could not last two hours of constant hammering and it was not even a load at 100% of the bus; more like 60-70%. All began disappearing and reappearing every few minutes (I am presuming after overheating subsided).
Additionally, for my future workstation at least I want everything inside. If I get an [e]ATX motherboard and the PC case for it then it would feel like a half-solution if I then have to stack a few drives or NAS-like enclosures at the side. And yeah I don't have a huge villa. Desk space can become a problem and I don't have cabinets or closets / storerooms either.
SATA SSDs fill a very valid niche to this day: quieter and less power-hungry and smaller NAS-like machines. Sure, not mainstream, I get how giants like Samsung think, but to claim they are no longer desirable tech like many in this thread do is a bit misinformed.
I wouldn't trust any USB-attached storage to be reliable enough for anything more than periodic incremental backups and verification scrubs. USB devices disappear from the bus too often for me to want to rely on them for online storage.