Why

I’m running a ZFS pool of 4 external USB drives. It’s a mix of WD Elements and enclosed IronWolfs. I’m looking to consolidate it into a single box since I’m likely to add another 4 drives to it in the near future and dealing with 8 external drives could become a bit problematic in a few ways.

ZFS with USB drives

There’s been recurrent questions about ZFS with USB. Does it work? How does it work? Is it recommended and so on. The answer is complicated but it revolves around - yes it works and it can work well so long as you ensure that anything on your USB path is good. And that’s difficult since it’s not generally known what USB-SATA bridge chipset an external USB drive has, whether it’s got firmware bugs, whether it requires quirks, is it stable under sustained load etc. Then that difficulty is multiplied by the number of drives the system has. In my setup for example, I’ve swapped multiple enclosure models till I stumbled on a rock-solid one. I’ve also had to install heatsinks on the ASM1351 USB-SATA bridge ICs in the WD Elements drives to stop them from overheating and dropping dead under heavy load. With this in mind, if a multi-bay unit like the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad proves to be as reliable as some anecdotes say, it could become a go-to recommendation for USB DAS that eliminates a lot of those variables, leaving just the host side since it comes with a cable too. And the host side tends to be reliable since it’s typically either Intel or AMD.

Initial observations of the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad

  • Built like a tank, heavy enclosure, feet screwed-in not glued
  • Well designed for airflow. Air enters the front, goes through the disks, PSU, main PCB and exits from the back. Some IronWolf that averaged 55°C in individual enclosures clock at 43°C in here
  • It’s got a Good Quality DC Fan (check pics). So far it’s pretty quiet
  • Uses 4x ASM235CM USB-SATA bridge ICs which are found in other well-regarded USB enclosures. It’s newer than the ASM1351 which is also reliable when not overheating
  • The USB-SATA bridges are wired to a USB 3.1 Gen 2 hub - VLI-822. No SATA port multipliers
  • The USB hub is heatsinked
  • The ASM235CM ICs have a weird thick thermal pad attached to them but without any metal attached to it. It appears they’re serving as heatsinks themselves which might be enough for the ICs to stay within working temps
  • The main PCB is all-solid-cap affair
  • The PSU shows electrolytic caps which is unsurprising
  • The main PCB is connected to the PSU via standard molex connectors like the ones found in ATX PSUs. Therefore if the built-in PSU dies, it could be replaced with an ATX PSU
  • It appears to rename the drives to its own “Elite Pro Quad A/B/C/D” naming, however hdparm -I /dev/sda seems to return the original drive information. The disks appear with their internal designations in GNOME Disks. The kernel maps them in /dev/disks/by-id/* according to those as before. I moved my drives in it, rebooted and ZFS started the pool as if nothing happened
  • SMART info is visible in GNOME Disks as well as smartctl -x /dev/sda
  • It comes with both USB-C to USB-C cable and USB-C to USB A
  • Made in Taiwan

Testing

  • No errors in the system logs so far
  • I’m able to pull 350-370MB/s sequential from my 4-disk RAIDz1
  • Loading the 4 disks together with hdparm results in about 400MB/s total bandwidth
  • It’s hooked up via USB 3.1 Gen 1 on a B350 motherboard. I don’t see a significant difference in the observed speeds whether it’s on the chipset-provided USB host, or the CPU-provided one
  • Completed a manual scrub of a 24TB RAIDz1 while also being loaded with an Immich backup, Plex usage, Syncthing rescans and some other services. No errors in the system log. Drives stayed under 44°C. Stability looks promising
  • Will pull a drive and add a new one to resilver once the latest changes get to the off-site backup
  • Pulled a drive from the pool and replaced it with a spare while the pool was live. SATA hot plugging seems to work. Resilvered 5.25TB in about 32 hours while the pool was in use. No errors
  • Resilvering iostat shows numbers in-line with the 500MB/s of the the USB 3.1 Gen 1 port it’s connected to:
      tps    kB_read/s    kB_wrtn/s    kB_dscd/s    kB_read    kB_wrtn    kB_dscd Device
   314.60       119.9M        95.2k         0.0k     599.4M     476.0k       0.0k sda
   264.00       119.2M        92.0k         0.0k     595.9M     460.0k       0.0k sdb
   411.00       119.9M        96.0k         0.0k     599.7M     480.0k       0.0k sdc
   459.40         0.0k       120.0M         0.0k       0.0k     600.0M       0.0k sdd

Verdict so far

It’s passed all of the testing so far with flying colors. I’m buying another one for the new disks.

Pics

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