That also implies that there is more to get excited about. It’s entirely possible that the leaks have completely stolen the thunder of their big reveal.

I also suspect that when they say “not official”, what they really mean is “not final”. i.e. These are prototypes, and could change by the time it’s officially announced. They could also be contractually limited from statements, in a “we can neither confirm nor deny” kind of way.

I do agree with your larger point that their press release left something to be desired.

Also, be sure to run extensive burn in tests before deploying for production use. I had an entire batch from GoHardDrive fail on me during that testing, so my data was never in danger.

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.

You currently have 16 disks connected via USB, in a ZFS array?

I highly recommend reimagining your path forward. Define your needs (sounds like a high-capacity storage server to me), define your constraints (e.g. cost), then develop a solution to best meet them.

Even if you are trying to build one on the cheap with a high Wife Acceptance Factor, there are better ways to do so than attaching 16+ USB disks to a thin client.