Going kind of crazy thinking about the options. I’m ultimately trying to get a stable media server running on my 4B (no transcoding) and I think I’m having power issues.
I had an externally powered NVMe enclosure but I stopped using it mainly because the enclosure wouldn’t turn itself back on after a power surge. I switched to a 2.5 SSD with an unpowered adapter cable but occasionally the drive gets disconnected (guessing it’s power issues). I would like to use the NVMe drives since I can easily fit the SSD into my desktop (ran out of NVMe slots). It would also be good if I had a solution that supported hardware RAID 1.
This is a hone media server, that will stream TV shows at a few megabits/sec? Is super fast transfer important for that? I would have expected to use an externally powered SATA hard drive, for capacity and economy.
You don’t want hardware raid. Add a powered (by a wall power supply) USB hub. If you want to keep using NVMe drives and mirror them, use ZFS for that. If you’d like to get more storage, get a USB direct attached storage (DAS) box like the ones from Terramaster and stick some disks in it. Those don’t need powered USB hub since they have that built-in. You’d still use ZFS to get your redundancy between disks. Later you can move the box to a different Pi or another computer. Later you can add more disks and expand space if you get a bigger box.
I thought about a USB hub but would that be a big bottleneck? I’ll never serve anything above a 1080p30 h264 file but conceivably I’d serve two of those at a time.
Edit: Sorry, did the math. Unless my connections suck ass I probably won’t have bottlenecks.
Yup. A USB 3 box with internal hub, with 4 disks does 600MB/s on a 5Gbps USB 3 port. You’d be limited by the Pi’s ports if they’re not quite 5Gbps, but you’d still move >200MB/s. I recall running 2 USB disks on a Pi 4, each did over 200MB/s so there’s at least that much bandwith on the Pi. That’s 1600Mbps. Typical 1080p is 5-10Mbps. You’re orders of magnitude away from that.
