drive Adaptor silliness

[Royce.Arnold]

I am wondering about that, the USB to 2.5 drive adapters seem to be simple plugs, and the main difference with the 3.5 plug is it needs 12v power.
so what is the "USB <-> SATA converter" that I have been assuming must be required ?

They are there. They can be incredibly small. I've never seen an adapter cable without one (even if they are within the injection molded plastic). SATA and USB use different signaling protocols and are not directly compatible. USB-C does have alternate signalling support in the specification, but I've not seen anyone use it for SATA.

I've seen a few SATA SSDs with built in USB ports. I've heard of WD / Seagate hard drives with native USB ports (but never seen one). I've shucked a few 8TB WD external drives and they all used a SATA to USB board with a USB connector and power input.

You might be able to use something like this and then find a cable to use between the motherboard and the board connector. But you'll still be introducing more points of failure... I'm not sure there is anyway around that. Even just a cable can fail (and yes I've experienced that).

 

[honegod]

use something like this and then find a cable

Yes.
this would be the very thing I started this thread to find.
you win !

four of these things free floating, located by the usb and sata power wires, plugged into 4 harddrives (rubber mounted) in the drive cage .

looks easy to unsolder the usb socket and run wire direct from the board once wire length is finalised.

 

[honegod]

shucked a few 8TB WD external drives and they all used a SATA to USB board with a USB connector and power input.

yes, I have a couple seagate boards, ( from 4 & 8 tb), each with the additional usb daisychain socket.
if I used them I could have a pair of usb sockets on the drive tower to plug external usb drives into.
or thumb drives.
but they are big and clunky.

I used the shucked 4 & 8tb 3.5s to first build this system, the case can do 2 stock.
then I looked into 2.5 spinners, and how to mount 4 in the case.
then I got high speed internet.
the first 14tb 3.5 arrived shortly.
internal housing is no longer a consideration.

 

[honegod]

when tapping a 3.5hdd to M3 - pin mode, use a "bottoming tap".
a regular tap has a taper ground into the thread at the tip, making it easier to start.
but the first few threads are cut shallow, the follow on full size thread brings it to full depth.
the 3.5 screw holes are blind, so the tap stops cutting when it hits bottom.
the holes are also short. so the standard tap is still in the taper when it stops.
the bottoming tap has no taper, so it is more difficult to start.
but the 3.5 cut is so shallow, and only on the tops of the freedom thread,
it's easy.

tldr; just hand screwing a metric vibe mount into a unmodded hdd, well into crossthread, supported the weight of the drive, with some wiggling.
no data on long term wear to the threads, but the mount is steel, the drive is aluminium.

 

[honegod]

a noctua D15 has a very good layout of heatpipes and fin stack, all evenly spaced.
if each fin was cut through between heatpipes, each heatpipe would become independent of all the others.
those finny tentacles, each individually pose-able.
with a 3D printed shroud/duct to the 120 on the case back.
with a 3D printed duct to a noctua 140mm industrial 3000rpm boost fan.
at normal loads the 120 is silent, and blows freely through the freewheeling 140.
the 140 kicks on mostly for kicks, but whatever temperature was set is maintained until the load goes away.

 

[honegod]

so, instead of usb.
I have a 1050ti in the x16 slot.
it only needs x4
so a M.2 to PCI slot adapter gives me remote mount videocard.

allowing me to use a x16 sata riser card.
one with 4 sata data sockets on the back panel would fill up the back cover.
an 8 socket twin slot would fill the lian-li and get the data cables to the drive array out of the way of the case outer panels.
the second slot cover could have plugs wired to the 4 motherboard sata sockets.

still have the power wires to rout.
and figure out where to put the videocard and duct and fan.
mount the videocard onto the drive array, and duct it to use the drive fans.

 

[kydsid]

But none of this is in a case. Why all this trouble when a motherboard swap would work?

I mean you do you and I'm obviously following this story as you proceed, so carry on regardless.

 

[honegod]

a motherboard swap would work?

yes.
the threadripper matx board has 8 sata plugs and a much roomier case.
but this is not about that.
this is about my daily driver doing what I want.

 

[honegod]

a major problem I have with drive caddy/hot swap enclosures is lack of cooling.
poor airflow.
largely due to having all the connectors on a single huge circuit board that blocks off that whole side of the drive array.
commonly the side the fan is mounted to. so the drive can be freely pulled out from the other end.
a few holes are put in the boards but the airflow is still restricted to WAY less than a 120mm fan wants to see.
at 1" thickness of the drive, a 1" spacing between drives will reduce airflow area to 50% of the array area.
much more like it.
having the connector board the same size as the plug end of the drive maintains the air 'duct' between drives.

my current setup has the fan blowing at the side of the drive stack so the air blows out the other side instead of using the ends.
I feel this is superior because it allows greater area for the entrance and exit of the air.
BUT the ducting gets complicated with arrays of lots of drives. (8 or 10)

my case is 9" wide, so a sideways stack of 5 drives with airflow spacing would be 10" wide.(1" between, 1/2" each end)
just right to sit the case on.
2 such arrays stacked vertically under the case would hold 10 well cooled drives and provide a stable base for the computer to sit on.
while taking up virtually no extra desk space.

 

[honegod]

mounted sideways the drive is 4" tall, add a half inch on top and bottom for rubber mounted aluminium slides that secure it to the all encompassing duct.
a 10" cube of acoustically isolated air cooled spinning rust.
the Noctua 200mm would fit nicely.
powered from the psu, the pwm portion could be controlled by a thermistor at each drive and an intake air temp. to compare them to.
if one drive heats up, the (suction) fan exhaust temperature will not rise at the same rate, so exhaust temp. isn't useful.

there needs to be a structure that can bear the weight of the computer and all those harddrives.
there needs to be a sealed air flow guide shroud.

the drive end exposed to the air at the intake end needs no sealing to the shroud.
an air filter at that end would need to seal to the shroud, but needs to be easy to remove.

the drive power and signal wires have to pierce the shroud, I do not want to wire 10 sets of plugs to the shroud, more if I want individual indicator leds for the drives, so I know which one to pull.
add a icon to the drive properties window, 'light drive led', naaw, right click menu in this PC.

 

[honegod]

Personally, I would avoid using USB as a long term live data storage conduit (my own personal bias / concern).

why ? I have no real problem with usb, it seems to be fairly well sorted, even the plugs have gotten decent, type C.
it is fast enough for rust,
the main problem I see seems to be low quality cables and adapters.

so I just ordered these

two different styles of motherboard adapters, so I can look at strains on the MB plug.

with these I can run another drive AND the sabrent toaster from the MB 3.0 front panel plug
bringing me up to 84tb

 

[Royce.Arnold]

why ? I have no real problem with usb, it seems to be fairly well sorted, even the plugs have gotten decent, type C.
it is fast enough for rust,
the main problem I see seems to be low quality cables and adapters.

so I just ordered these

View attachment 508396View attachment 508397View attachment 508398View attachment 508399
two different styles of motherboard adapters, so I can look at strains on the MB plug.

with these I can run another drive AND the sabrent toaster from the MB 3.0 front panel plug
bringing me up to 84tb

Great. I hope it works out for you.

My experience with USB is that there is still a certain amount of issues that cause devices to disconnect at times or take other measures to resolve. I experience 1 or 2 per month with various devices. It's a personal preference / bias on my part. If it working for your application, great. Based on my experience, I would not use it for long term online storage.

 

[honegod]

It's a personal preference / bias on my part.

understood, I have a semirational bias against honda.
yes, usb is flakey and I can see loss of access to the drive as a random event.

but, here the usb drives are more aimed at backup for the sata drives, so the main hassle I see is usb dropping in the middle of a 6tb file copy, requiring starting it over.
I would be worried if there was a file corruption risk, but I see none.
hence asking you for details because I do not understand usb.

for instance, I am assuming that each usb port on the computer has its own pipeline to the drive, so I expect full speed transferring files between 2 usb drives on different ports.
that is why I'm not considering a hub to plug 5 drives into because all 5 would be bottlenecked through the single port the hub plugs into.

 

[Royce.Arnold]

for instance, I am assuming that each usb port on the computer has its own pipeline to the drive, so I expect full speed transferring files between 2 usb drives on different ports.
that is why I'm not considering a hub to plug 5 drives into because all 5 would be bottlenecked through the single port the hub plugs into.

You may want to research your hardware further. Bandwidth for non-processor attached USB ports will likely be shared at the hub / chipset level. At the processor level, I'm not sure. They are probably independent, but you would have to check the processor specification to be sure. At the chipset level, even your SATA ports are sharing bandwidth with your USB ports. It's a fair amount of bandwidth, so you may not hit the limit. You'll also likely find that you have a mixture of USB ports attached to different sources. Many motherboard manuals will have some type of interconnect overview that will allow you to see what is connected to what.

 

[Okatis]

Just re multiple drives via a single USB port, there are many posts on /r/DataHoarder of bad user experiences with this, below just a few from pages I've saved when I was looking into it. Seems from your most recent post though you're looking into a single cable per drive though which would be better.

if you end up getting one you'll probably regret it and wish that you went with SATA, or a server, or something else.

The only reason why I made the jump to SAS HBA with SATA drives is because the majority of esata and even usb 3.0 controllers and enclosures are horribly unreliable, or have bad performance.

I wasted so much money on enclosures and cards that's it's fucking sad. During large data transfers, it was either event log entries saying the controller from the enclosure had been issue a reset, or the drives dropping from the enclosure altogether. And despite the 5gbs or 6gbs throughput of usb 3.0 and esata respectively, no chip controller from the enclosure will be able to saturate that on parallel disk drive access.

I no longer use anything eSATA ... Only usb 3.0+ and for single drives only, never multi drive enclosures, and for unimportant stuff or stuff that is already backed up somewhere else.

There are many inconsistencies between USB3 chipsets and people have had varying degree's of success running JBOD's off of USB3. The chipsets exist on both the controller and the external enclosures and can be tricky to get a solid chipset because they aren't typically disclosed pre-purchase. eSATA doesn't usually suffer from this issue.

 

[honegod]

Many motherboard manuals will have some type of interconnect overview

not my asus mini itx gamer board manual. I just checked, it is at the "plug usb stuff here" level.
but 4 pages on how to cope with the M.2 riser card silliness, a couple more pages there would be useful.

I do not find all the information in the world at my fingertips with the world wide web.

a single cable per drive though which would be better.

same problem with a NAS or SAN, one wire to connect all the drives contained.

otoh, the usb 3.2 socket at 10gb might be able to handle a couple drives plugged into a hub

 

[rhkcommander959]

NAS is fine but if you want speed you should go DAS, it's really fast if you have thunderbolt too. I have a 5-bay DAS from Terramaster, 4x4TB Raid 0 and a 16TB single drive, works wonders! It's about as fast as it would be if built in, but I also get a handle to grab it on the go.

You could possibly split the main PCIe slot too with bifurcation, depending on the mobo and all. Food for thought.

 

[Royce.Arnold]

not my asus mini itx gamer board manual. I just checked, it is at the "plug usb stuff here" level.
but 4 pages on how to cope with the M.2 riser card silliness, a couple more pages there would be useful.

In that case, try USBTreeView from https://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtreeview_e.html

It should show you a tree with your different ports. You may have to move a device to different ports to see whats attached to what.

 

[honegod]

try USBTreeView

did that, it shows every usb device in one row from the usb controller.
everything I have plugged in shows up properly, in a single line.
so it does not appear to be looking at it the way I want to see.
or at least can recognise, there is a lot of stuff on endpoints but it is in a language I have no rosetta stone for.
the gui representation is of a one channel series with 20 odd taps

the seagate in the sabrent is at #22 plugged into a 3.2 gen2 type A port on the back panel
at very near the bottom of the layout.
everything I thought I understood said it is all ooper dooper.

when I ran the program the drive had been Idle for a while and self powered down.
it reported no drive in the system, so I power cycled the toaster and it appeared.

THAT could be a problem unless I put a switch in the power lead to the usb adapter in the mail.
an advantage to a separate power plug in the adapter within easy reach..
although I read the program can eject and restore, I did not stumble across that functionality.

 

[Okatis]

same problem with a NAS or SAN, one wire to connect all the drives contained.

otoh, the usb 3.2 socket at 10gb might be able to handle a couple drives plugged into a hub

The main problem isn't one of bandwidth with USB for multi-bay it's with the controllers and reliability.

 

[Royce.Arnold]

What motherboard do you have?

You should see something like this:

 

[honegod]

as described, I skipped over the usb 2 hub @11.
asus rog strix Z490i gaming.

 

[Royce.Arnold]

Weird. Never seen one like this. Maybe an Intel xhci side effect. Not sure I trust the details, but it says one controller which would imply shared bandwidth. Very hard to believe they are all on the same controller...

 

[honegod]

possibly it is that mine says usb 3.0 and 3.1 yours does not.
so instead of being limited to two ports per root hub the data sloshes around freely in the 3 zone.
26 ports on one root hub.
I want ports 2, 11, and 14 back, I do not want that stuff.

 

[Nobu]

I want ports 2, 11, and 14 back, I do not want that stuff.

Probably not possible. Except for maybe the bluetooth, they're all probably internal devices, directly wired to the main USB controller. The usb 2 hub probably controls two usb2 headers on the board.

 

[Royce.Arnold]

possibly it is that mine says usb 3.0 and 3.1 yours does not.

Ahh... That was just a one of their examples screenshots, not my system. The "one row" comment threw me off. Just wanted to make sure we were talking about the same thing.

Here's a generic block diagram for the Z490 chipset.

All USB ports are attached to the Chipset. None directly connect to the processor. They (along with everything else attached to the chipset) will contend for a share of the DMI 3.0 connection with the processor. It appears that the DMI 3.0 connection is 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes. So, a total of 32 Gbps.

 

[Royce.Arnold]

Also, it looks like that motherboard has a full electrical 1x16 slot. So that means any NVMe drive that you might be using is going to be connected thru the chipset.

 

[honegod]

they're all probably internal devices, directly wired to the main USB controller.

that's what I figure, sort of a get off my lawn moment, shouting at the weather.

the adapters for the motherboard 3.0 plug promise to arrive today so I can swap the sabrent over there and see how that works.
the drive adapter is not in this shipment so I cannot hook up 2 sata hdds to that one port, yet.

 

[honegod]

Also, it looks like that motherboard has a full electrical 1x16 slot. So that means any NVMe drive that you might be using is going to be connected thru the chipset.

I do not understand.
does that have anything to do with the videocard slot ?
the M.2-2 slot is "shared with sata" so that is where I figure to use the C nvme m.2, if I use the 5sata port adapter M.2 in the M.2-1 slot.

 

[Royce.Arnold]

Based on the diagram, the 16 processor pcie lanes can be divided for different uses (like NVMe). But that motherboard uses all 16 for the x16 pcie slot. So, everything runs through the chipset. That was the point I was trying to make.

Basically, everything you will be using is sharing the 32Gb/s bandwidth. That's a lot. But your usage pattern of what you attach will determine if you hit any limit.

 

[honegod]

your usage pattern of what you attach will determine if you hit any limit.

mostly 200mbs spinners, a m.2 Cdrive.
I paid for Drive Bender, and am thinking of using a "landing drive" of a couple tb in the drive pool, a sata 2.5 solid state sounds good.
I have a 250gb samsung 850 evo I used in a laptop with which I can experiment along those lines.
progress proceeds.

 

[honegod]

to clear the volume above the M.2 drives I ordered a new cpu heatsink that looks to have none of the overhang the noctua has.
a Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE CPU Air Cooler, Dual Tower 6 Heat Pipe
I am interested in how well the thermalright and noctua mounting systems coincide, the bit under the motherboard has to be the same size, but all the rest can be completely different.
it would be sweet if the T uses the same basic hardware so I just have to unscrew the N and drop the T in its place.
we'll see.

this should enable me to use the M.2 5 sata port adapter and so have all nine 14tb direct sata connected.
with 2 usb drives for expansion.

 

[honegod]

I also ordered four 2 foot long aluminium angle irons, 1" x 2" x 1/16.

it occurred to me that the drive does not need to actually need to be screwed solidly to the case, it just needs to not casually fall out.
so instead of screwing a angle to the drive so it can screw to the angle of the drive "case" I can just slide the drive with the mounts directly on the case angle.
a 1" ledge for the drive to sit on, and 2" tall gives airflow clearance to the next 1" ledge to sit on.

at 24" I can get three 8" long pieces per chunk. 4 chunks gives me mounts for 6 drives.

 

[honegod]

the basic plan is 2 stacks of 5 drives, side by side.
the bottom angles can be located by bolting them to aluminium extrusions. I have some 20x40 I got for my printer project that will work.
the sides are taking more thought.
the side needs to seal for the fan to draw air through the drive array, but the 2" tall sides of the angle take care of that, with a little sealing of the edges where they meet.
so I am looking at using thin aluminium roof flashing as the vertical side panels.
the forces acting on the thin panel will mostly be the weight of the drive wanting to twist the angle top inward, which will be resisted by the side rubber mounts of the drive.
so the bolts holding the side to the angles should be near the top of the angle.
I also am looking at using the side bolts to attach some passive locating gubbins to stop the drive from going up, and lock it in the in/out direction.
using both "inner" bolts for passive locating will let me use just the outside "outer" bolt to have a latch on a corner of the drive,
that I can tighten with only 1 screw that does not need to be removed to swap drives.

this is looking doable.

 

[honegod]

the weight of the drive wanting to twist the angle top inward, which will be resisted by the side rubber mounts of the drive.

did experiment. the angle pivots at the side mount, the bottom kicks out a little bit, the top leans in a bit.
so I like the idea of two strips of aluminium with holes bolted to the outer face of the stack of angles.
with neoprene glued on for sealing between the strips.
I like the idea of gluing the aluminium bits together, but my experience of structural adhesives has been poor.