Trying to bring new life to an old eSATA enclosure and port multiplier. Help please!

Looking to build a new NAS from some old legacy hardware I HAD been using with CentOS 7 and, well it retired and now I want to use it again. Here is the poop.

AMD Athlon II X2 (I believe, been a long time) and an MSI 970A-G43 board. 16 GB DDR3.

Old Radeon video, not super relevant as I plan to run this headless.

2.5Gb Realtek NIC.

500Gb internal SATA HDD

HighPoint Rocket 644 port multiplier

Rosewill RS-8V eSATA RAID enclosure (softwar raid, no hardware which is kind of how it got shoved to the side).

4@ Seagate SATA 2TB HDDs with less than 50 hours total use on them.

4@ Seagate SATA 1TB HDDs with not much more total use on them...

USB 3.0 hub

2 @ Western Digital USB 3.0 HDDs

2 @ SSK USB 3.0 NVME enclosures fitted with Crucial P3+ 2 TB NVME SSDs

IF I can get this all working happy that would give me 20TB max capacity, of course I would want some redundancy.

The big questions I have though, before I dive too deep down this rabbit hole is this. How can I get that Rocket 644 eSATA port multiplier working with OMV 7?

I know this is going to hammer my storage capacity, but I figure on the eSATA drives, configure it for 2 groups of RAID 5 fo the 1TB and 2TB drives, and is it even possible to do a software RAID on the mismatched 2TB USB 3.0 drives? Yes that would pull me down to what, 15TB with parity I believe, which is still WAY more than I will use even with moving my entire DVD and CD collection onto it...

I stand corrected. My Rocket 644 appears to have gone AWOL as it is not in the system I remember stuffing it into. It might have ended up in a project box my BIL had a few years back... Ooops.

Looked up the compatible chipsets and ordered a new port multiplier to connect this up. Verified some more specs and this is what I have got going on.

Antec Sonata Case. The original and still chugging along, filled with...

Antec silent 500w PSU.

AMD Athlon II X2 (I believe, been a long time) and an MSI 970A-G43 board, Crucial 16 GB DDR3. Unfortunately I bought this at TigerDirect 2 email addresses ago so I can't exactly look up my purchase history since they are gone now... The board is verified, the memory is verified the RAM is verified, the CPU, well... kinda don't care. It has to beat an N100!

Old Radeon video, not super relevant as I plan to run this headless.

2.5Gb Realtek NIC.

500Gb Western Digital internal SATA HDD

10Gtek PCIe port multiplier (should be here tomorrow) with the ASMedia ASM1061 chipset. Since OMV is based on Debian, looked up compatibility with Debian and it looks good.

The eSATA storage attached is configured thusly...

Rosewill RS-8V eSATA RAID enclosure (softwar raid, no hardware which is kind of how it got shoved to the side).

4@ Seagate SATA 2TB HDDs with less than 50 hours total use on them.

4@ Seagate SATA 1TB HDDs with not much more total use on them...

If I set them up as RAID 5 groups then that gives me 9TB usable volume...

The USB 3.0 attached storage is configured thusly...

USB 3.0 hub

2 @ Western Digital USB 3.0 HDDs

2 @ SSK USB 3.0 NVME enclosures fitted with Crucial P3+ 2 TB NVME SSDs

I don't particularly want to sacrifice half of the available storage there to get redundancy, so that would give me 8TB of storage...

Not super familiar with OMV so here is where the questions come in...

So for my pre-flight check as it were my plan, good, bad, or ugly is this...

1. Finish dusting off, and reassembling the host / eSATA controller / eSATA enclosure (take a swiffer to it and stab the new card in, cable it all up).
2. Get OMV 7 on a flash drive and start the install.
3. Configure the RAID groups, RAID 5 group 1 of the 2TB disks, and RAID 5 group 2 of the 1TB disks.
4. Bring those RAID groups into a single large LVM PV, VG, and LV.
5. The data I want, and the 2TB Crucial NVME are currently running on a Raspberry Pi 4 so set up the NFS share, mount it from the pi and rsync it to the OMV NAS. Verify it is happy. This is going to stay this way for a bit though (need to move the other services like Jellyfin off of that Pi before I can decommission it and recover the storage...).
6. Move the WD External USB 3.0 HDDs and the other USB 3.0 SSD that is not on the Raspberry Pi over.
7. Set up a secondary backup cache LVM PV, VG and LV on the external USB 3.0 stuff. Which brings me to the biggest next question.

What is a good, inexpensive, usable, OFFSITE backup storage that won't cost me an arm, a leg and my firstborn?

I am thinking, perhaps incorrectly, that Amazon Glacier could be put to service this way...

Okay so OMV7 is installed, left a little flat footed right now due to a couple of hardware issues (recycling old hardware, no huge shocks), and a couple of how do I do this in OMV questions.

Hardware issues. One of the 1TB HDDs is in a failed will not power on state. I have another one, no huge deal.

Bigger issue. One of the ports and cables for the enclosure appears to have been damaged. WIll need to power it all down, take the case apart, I suspect the port is just a regular eSATA to SATA pigtail, but the proof is in the pudding. If so I can source up replacements pretty easily and quickly.

But I am now at the WTF do I do with this storage in OMV?

More correctly, where / how do I actually manage the disks / file systems / shares? I.E. blow out the antique mdadm RAID group and create a new one to suit my needs now....

Documenting this for my own sanity and the off chance that anyone else is dumb enough to try to duplicate this just better than welfare approach. And I stand corrected on my hardware listed, doesn't matter much,but it DOES matter.

Salvaged from orphaned projects / systems (My old CentOS 7 desktop)

1. Antec Sonata Case. The original and still chugging along, filled with...
2. Antec silent 500w PSU.
3. AMD Athlon II X2 250 3Ghz,
4. MSI 970A-G43 board,
5. Crucial 32 GB DDR3
6. Old Radeon video, not super relevant as I plan to run this headless.
7. 1 TB Silicon Power or other misc cheap SATA SSD. Don't recall the brand, not important... It works is all I care about. I need to 3D print a 3.5" to 2.5" hard drive adapter though, this thing is held into the cage with one screw.

The eSATA storage attached is configured thusly...

1. Rosewill RS-8V eSATA RAID enclosure populated with...
2. 4@ Seagate SATA 2TB HDDs with less than 50 hours total use on them.
3. 2@ Seagate SATA 1TB HDDs with not much more total use on them...
4. 2@ Western Digital SATA 1TB HDDs

Items I had to purchase new to make it work...

1. 2.5Gb Realtek NIC. I didn't want to spend 10GBaseT money on a storage array that can't match it.
2. 10Gtek PCIe port multiplier with the ASMedia ASM1061 chipset. The Original Silicon Image controller is no longer supported in the Linux Kernel..
3. PC1 port was broken, got a StarTech 2 port eSATA bracket to scrounge the eSATA port / internal cable.
4. Since one of the cables was damaged along with the port, I got a new pair of Cable Matters 6ft eSATA cables to repair it.
5. One of the Western Digital 1TB HDDs was failed, replaced with a new one.

The eSATA controller and enclosure are limited to 3Gb/s which is half of the USB 3.0 hardware which has not yet been introduced into the mix...

Right now OMV7 is installed, the eSATA array is configured, the OS is updated, OMV extras is installed, zfs is installed and I am poking around under the hood with that.

WIped it back out, went in with a fresh load of Debian 12, blew out the HDD configurations / file systems / preexisting RAID groups and THEN reinstalled OMV 7. Got OMV going, and setting the RAID 5 groups, mdadm RAID 5 for /dev/md0 (4 @ 2TB HDDs) and RAID 5 for /dev/md1 (4 @ 1TB HDDs). Now I am discovering just how slow the Athlon II X2 250 is...

I was WRONG on the specs, thought that was one of my quad core CPUs, nope it is a Dual core...

Right now the CPU is being gobbled up by md0_raid5, md0_resync, md1_raid5, md1_resync.

We are hardly touching the memory, but flogging the living snot out of the processor.

Bad enough I am wishing that I could find an eSATA port multiplier HAT for a Raspberry Pi 5....

I have an AMD FX8350 as a pullout available to me I just need a friend to come home from vacation. (We swap computer parts a LOT, he wants some of the DDR3 I have....)

Closing this thread and giving up on the eSATA setup.

Quote from burnbasket

Do you see any need to recover the data from you old setup?

Depending on the volume of data stored, the device's IO and CPU Performance, this can take days, not minutes. For spinning metal, for a total of

52TB you should be willing to wait at least a week (or two) depending on how much of the data is defective.

No. Currently my data is housed on an R Pi 4B with a 4TB USB 3.0 / NVME storage... And backed up to my Google drive...

I should boil down where my data is and why I want a NAS.

Raspberry Pi 4B 8G Jellyfin server. This is the one with the 4TB USB 3.0 / NVME setup. It currently has about 1.5TB on it.

Nucbox K11 with 1TB NVME. About half full of stuff likewise backed up to my Google drive.

ROG Strix G17 laptop with 1TB NVME, Some stuff backed up, some not. Needs to ALL be backed up.

Lenovo V15 laptop 1TB NVME + 4TB USB 3.0 / NVME rig, the external NVME has about 3TB on it.

The idea here is to centralize storage for these, AND the Pi / Docker Swarm / Kubernetes cluster for stuff that I should have on prem. Set up an S3 Glacier bucket and try to figure out how to archive my backups there offsite...

For now the OMV host is basically blank storage since I have yet to get it working properly... No need to archive anything off of it.

Multi TB yes, MANY TB no... My data is spread and I am planning for data growth. I have a host set up with Automatic Ripping Machine and I am wanting to convert my old LARGE DVD collection to mp4 (Not sure of the number, but I have a 150qt tote full of DVDs, and I want to convert them to mp4 files so I can stream them to myself without messing with physical media...

Plus I do a lot of video editing / processing...

And I have around ~500gb of archival data from my late wife I do not want to lose... Her old writings, photos, sound clips that sort of stuff.