8 drives over USB 3.0 won't perform well, though a single SATA connection isn't without issues either. That cable will be the I/O limiter in an uncommon fashion. I'd go for the eSATA converter option but neither is ideal. A big question is how will the drives be seen by Proxmox? If it's as one big drive that means you're SOL for safe storage options, if so I wouldn't store anything you don't want to lose on there and just make a ZFS storage pool of it in Proxmox.

As for plans I would down the line look at Ceph because it does really well with cheap hardware. No need for a competent RAID controller etc.

Hmm. I would probably use some kind of SATA to eSATA adapter for the least amount of purchasing.

But if you want to have small form factor compute nodes, I'd suggest replacing the dumb enclosure with a smarter (and faster) NAS or SAN. This way, you wouldn't be relying so much on janky hacks.

Honestly if you want to optimize for stability and speed I would ditch the MediaSonic Box and try to move the drives into the dell servers themselves. If the MediaSonic drives are 2.5 in it looks like the 7040s have an internal bay. For the 3040s it sounds like you are only using 1 of the 2 5.25in drive bays. I would say it's better to have 4 drives hooked up via pcie then 8 via eSATA. (got the drive data via dells website, might be different)

it says on that mediasonic link

Important Note: • For eSata connection: Make sure your eSata port Support port multiplier. Most onboard eSata and some eSata PCI-E card only Support up to 5 drives. To see all 8 hard drives in eSata you need a eSata PCIe card that supports 8 drives.

I'm assuming the enclosure doesn't do any of the raid/array configuration, it just passes data through.

as far as I know only USB and eSata can do port multiplying. I think if you want to get access to all the drives you'll have to get a pcie card to handle the eSata or just use USB3. eSata (6gb/s) is faster than USB3 (5gb/s) and you might actually manage to saturate the connection trying to read or write to 8 drives though one cable.

in your use case both options are less than desirable but esata (if done correctly) could be faster. USB3 will probably be fine unless you really need that extra gb/s of speed

Edit: It looks like sata port multiplying can exist but its not really supported by manufacturers nor required by the standard so hit and miss as to whether a board can handle it.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 13 acronyms.

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