How to connect a SATA / ESATA / USB 3.0 device over Gigabit Ethernet

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I am looking for a way to connect an 5.25 SATA removable drive bay from CRU to our HP Proliant 360 blade server. Unfortunately the server has no support for USB 3.0 and no free PCI slot to upgrade USB 3.0 functionality. Also it doesn't have an eSATA port. Is there a solution to connect this drive bay via Ethernet? The key is the reading speed as we use the CRU drives to receive big file sets.
Thank you for the help.

Best Answer

Current USB over IP implementations supports only USB 2.0 speed, and in my opinion isn't very fast and reliable.

If you need a robust way to connect HDDs over network, you should look for some SAN (provides block storage)/NAS instead (provides network filesystem), depending on your needs. Most SAN and NAS hardware comes with hot-swap bays.

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Linux – detect specific device is USB / SATA apart from dmesg output

You can get that information from /sys virtual file system.

Run find /sys -name \*sd[ab]\*. Some of the lines from my station are:

/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-1/2-1.1/2-1.1:1.0/host69/target69:0:0/69:0:0:0/block/sdb
/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block/sda

There is "usb" in the line with sdb, there's none in the line with sda, so the USB drive is sdb.

Another piece of information that you can get is from

cat /sys/class/block/sda/removable
cat /sys/class/block/sdb/removable

files. If file's contents is 0, then the device isn't removable, so it cannot be an external USB drive. Some SATA drives report themselves as removable, so it may not be definitive.

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I understand your logic in going with a USB 3.0 PCIe card over the integrated USB 2.0 slot... But this is still a pretty bad idea. Unless you're installing "HyperV Server" (stripped down with the minimum features for a hypervisor only), it may even be near useless if you can actually get an OS install to work.

USB drives don't have device access times that you'd need to get anything resembling reasonable performance for an Enterprise production environment.

Perhaps try a consumer grade PCIe SSD?

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