On 12/15/2009 7:48 AM, Scott Ehrlich wrote:
I have a client with a handful of USB drives connected to a CentOS box. I am charged with binding the USB drives together into a single LVM for a cheap storage data pool (10 x 1 TB usb drives = 10 TB cheap storage in a single mount point).
(snip)
What are my best options?
Um, don't? Like other people said, go with eSATA, hopefully hooked up to a 4-drive or 8-drive enclosure (or even a 10-drive enclosure).
Alternately, go with an external SAS storage rack that supports both SAS / SATA drives. A SAS card for PCIe is fairly inexpensive ($200?) and the external enclosures are probably going to be (but not certainly) better made then inexpensive SATA enclosures.
The big problem with USB is that it only supports about 25MB/s per port, which means that it's going to be very very slow. Modern hard drives can push 50-80MB/s easily.