3 ms·

Enclosure prices are ridiculous, someone needs to enter that market and slaughter it.

by PatrolX 6y ago

ggm 6y ago
No disagree! https://kobol.io/ https://kobol.io/ looked interesting. I'm unaffiliated.
- PatrolX 6y ago
  It would be more interesting if they reduced the price by $200. Raspberry PI and a bit of plastic.
  - freeqaz 6y ago
    If you want actually decent performance, you need a board with real I/O available (like PCI-E and SATA). And full speed gigabit, if you want to be able to access your data at reasonable speeds. And if you want it to be quiet + cool your drives, that costs money. Not to mention the software — Is this bare metal or does it come with a base OS? Does the vendor offer driver support or are you stuck with ancient Debian? What about manufacturing volume, is it 1000 units or 10 million units? Those all will influence the price, especially for something fairly niche. ;)
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  That’s all hypothetical until they move from pre-order to regular sales.
  - Scene_Cast2 6y ago
    I have their previous version (the smaller form factor with ECC RAM). I trust them to deliver.
jrockway 6y ago
I wonder if there is demand. People go crazy about their data, and the way they "protect" it is with fancy bits of metal, not reed-solomon codes. I have found 3D printing very fruitful for all of my one-off enclosure needs. For larger things (i.e., 100 hard drives, not O(10) SSDs) I recommend looking into bending sheet metal. This is a technique that I just learned about and it's been eye-opening. Everything in the world is bent sheet metal. And the CAD skills you learn doing 3D printing translate nicely to sheet metal.
bsamuels 6y ago
I definitely felt the same way when I was shopping for my first NAS. A two-bay Synology ran about $300 for new on Amazon and I just couldn't figure out why it was so expensive. A few months later I picked one up used on Ebay for $120, and after using it for a few weeks, I can now report why these cost so much. The amount of software that comes on this thing is absolutely mind blowing. I was able to set up a bidirectional sync to my cloud drive, differential backups, compressed folders for archival, and a backup to Glacier for off-site backup without writing a single line of code. With a bit of additional digging into their package center, I found out I could install Docker & run GitLab on the NAS, along with a bunch of other self-hostable software. I realize I could have probably built my own NAS and used FreeNAS for a fraction of the price of buying new, however the amount of time that would have spent configuring/debugging/setting up FreeNAS makes the vendor-purchased NAS a much better investment.
- PatrolX 6y ago
  The cloud features you described are trivial to implement, I don't see how those features justify such a high price.
- dingaling 6y ago
  But those features weren't in your original specification ( 'I need a NAS enclosure' ) so why pay for them? The manufacturers know that plain mechanical enclosures have very low margins so they implement features that are perceived-needs ( 'oh that sounds cool!' ) and crank the margins by hundreds of per cent.

Enclosure prices are ridiculous, someone needs to enter that market and slaughter it.

ggm 6y ago

No disagree! https://kobol.io/ https://kobol.io/ looked interesting. I'm unaffiliated.

PatrolX 6y ago
It would be more interesting if they reduced the price by $200. Raspberry PI and a bit of plastic.
- freeqaz 6y ago
  If you want actually decent performance, you need a board with real I/O available (like PCI-E and SATA). And full speed gigabit, if you want to be able to access your data at reasonable speeds. And if you want it to be quiet + cool your drives, that costs money. Not to mention the software — Is this bare metal or does it come with a base OS? Does the vendor offer driver support or are you stuck with ancient Debian? What about manufacturing volume, is it 1000 units or 10 million units? Those all will influence the price, especially for something fairly niche. ;)
ashtonkem 6y ago
That’s all hypothetical until they move from pre-order to regular sales.
- Scene_Cast2 6y ago
  I have their previous version (the smaller form factor with ECC RAM). I trust them to deliver.

jrockway 6y ago

I wonder if there is demand. People go crazy about their data, and the way they "protect" it is with fancy bits of metal, not reed-solomon codes. I have found 3D printing very fruitful for all of my one-off enclosure needs. For larger things (i.e., 100 hard drives, not O(10) SSDs) I recommend looking into bending sheet metal. This is a technique that I just learned about and it's been eye-opening. Everything in the world is bent sheet metal. And the CAD skills you learn doing 3D printing translate nicely to sheet metal.

bsamuels 6y ago

I definitely felt the same way when I was shopping for my first NAS. A two-bay Synology ran about $300 for new on Amazon and I just couldn't figure out why it was so expensive. A few months later I picked one up used on Ebay for $120, and after using it for a few weeks, I can now report why these cost so much. The amount of software that comes on this thing is absolutely mind blowing. I was able to set up a bidirectional sync to my cloud drive, differential backups, compressed folders for archival, and a backup to Glacier for off-site backup without writing a single line of code. With a bit of additional digging into their package center, I found out I could install Docker & run GitLab on the NAS, along with a bunch of other self-hostable software. I realize I could have probably built my own NAS and used FreeNAS for a fraction of the price of buying new, however the amount of time that would have spent configuring/debugging/setting up FreeNAS makes the vendor-purchased NAS a much better investment.

PatrolX 6y ago
The cloud features you described are trivial to implement, I don't see how those features justify such a high price.
dingaling 6y ago
But those features weren't in your original specification ( 'I need a NAS enclosure' ) so why pay for them? The manufacturers know that plain mechanical enclosures have very low margins so they implement features that are perceived-needs ( 'oh that sounds cool!' ) and crank the margins by hundreds of per cent.