I was playing around with various NAS Distros and found OMV which is based on Debian which is a refreshing change from BSD. I had no trouble implementing the a USB3 drive pass through on my somewhat beefy ESXi server.
I was wondering what the viability is of using usb3 external drives in Raid 1 or 5. I don't need break neck speeds, but I would like to be able to have 10TB of somewhat redundant storage.
The Server should have at least 8 gigs of ram and near 2x2.9ghz i5 cores at this VM's expense.
I would appreciate some feed back to someone who is more to the know if this is just a terribly stupid idea or the poor man's external array.
To justify this system:
ESXI is running on a low power i5 in a tiny case with a raid 1 on 2x 2.5 drives. The whole thing has a minimal power foot print and allows me to not implement multiple machines. I was originally going to make a separate FreeNAS computer, but I realized I had the CPU cycles and ram to spare on my virtual box.