I’m looking to replace my sff J5040 Wyze machine. Its still plenty fast enough, but storage has become an issue with its limited USB endpoint availability of ~50 device limit.

I know that just switching it up to a newer Intel system could give me double the endpoints because of the two XHCI chip setup, but I was thinking that if I’m going to replace it, I’d like to not limit myself.

As such, even though Ryzen is far faster than I need, it does now support USB4. Does anyone know if the switch to USB4 would give the system a larger address range and have more than 127 USB devices or is that limitation still in place and I might as well not waste my money?

  • Nollij@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    Thank you for the extra context. It’s relieving to know you don’t just have a bunch of USB “backup” drives connected.

    To break this down to its simplest elements, you basically have a bunch of small DASes connected to a USB host controller. The rest could be achieved using another interface, such as SATA, SAS, or others. USB has certain compromises that you really don’t want happening to a member of a RAID, which is why you’re getting warnings from people about data loss. SATA/SAS don’t have this issue.

    You should not have to replace the cable ever, especially if it does not move. Combined with the counterfeit card, it sounds like you had a bad parts supplier. But yes, parts can sometimes fail, and replacements on SAS are inconvenient. You also (probably) have to find a way to cool the card, which might be an ugly solution.

    I eventually went with a proper server DAS (EMC ktn-stl3, IIRC), connected via external SAS cable. It works like a charm, although it is extremely loud and sucks down 250w @ idle. I don’t blame anyone for refusing this as a solution.

    I wrote, rewrote, and eventually deleted large sections of this response as I thought through it. It really seems like your main reason for going USB is that specific enclosure. There should really be an equivalent with SAS/SATA connectors, but I can’t find one. DAS enclosures pretty much suck, and cooling is a big part of it.

    So, when it all comes down to it, you would need a DAS with good, quiet airflow, and SATA connectors. Presumably this enclosure would also need to be self-powered. It would need either 4 bays to match what you have, or 16 to cover everything you would need. This is a simple idea, and all of the pieces already exist in other products.

    But I’ve never seen it all combined. It seems the data hoarder community jumps from internal bays (I’ve seen up to 15 in a reasonable consumer config) straight to rackmount server gear.

    Your setup isn’t terrible, but it isn’t what it could/should be. All things being equal, you really should switch the drives over to SATA/SAS. But that depends on finding a good DAS first. If you ever find one, I’d be thrilled to switch to it as well.