Thank you very much for your insightful post.
I am definitely going to ditch the daisy chain and “fan” out the drives.
Your suggestion of an 8 port USB hub needs to consider one thing though, any USB hub with more than 4 ports is actually just a daisy chain itself.
An 8 port USB hub would internally be at least two 4 port hubs and maybe even three.
Your point still stands though.
I really like your suggestion on setting it up to run fsck and/or smartmontools automatically .
I’m going to really need to do some reading up on that and I may be picking your brain a little bit about that in the future.
You had mention this once before to me in the past when one of my 2.5" drives was giving me issues: Can't mount previously mounted USB HDD - #106 by JimKnopf
I have been running remote fsck and smartctl checks via ssh from my laptop at the moment and everything looks fine so far with no new errors since my issue when drive 2 was moving a file to drive 3.
The NAS option is expensive, with the NAS itself nearly costing the same as my drives.
I get these 8TB drives for $120 (I have 5 of them at the moment) and a 5 bay NAS cost $600+ typically.
RAID is not a recommended route to go when using “Archive” drives either.
So if I’m getting a non-RAID enclosure to minimize my hubs then a 5 bay USB3 DAS that cost $110 would make more since for my use case I think.
Again, thank you VERY VERY MUCH for your input!
My next step is to fan out these drives instead of the daisy chain.
Then to look into automating checks.
After that I’ll keep my eye open for enclosure options.
Would it make any difference to start the fan with the two separate USB ports on the Vero?
Right now I have 5x 8TB hubs (only using 4 at the moment) and two 2.5" drives (one 5TB and one 4TB) and then there’s the USB remote dongle.
So given this, which would be better?
Option A:
Option B:
