19 ms·

Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee Carrier Board

115 points by tobijkl 6y ago

the-dude 6y ago
Title is misleading? End of the article : There’s close to no information about the software right now, and the hardware is not available yet
gitowiec 6y ago
Do not buy ROCK Pi SATA HAT. I own one, and after few months of lite usage with 4 SSDs, one channel (two SSD connectors) has just died. I just installed OpenMediaVault and configured LVM on 2TB, 2x 1TB and .5 TB SSDs, to use it as a home media server. I recently tried to initialize warranty process (I bought it directly from shop.allnetchina.cn with shipping to Central Europe) but I got no replay.
- lnsru 6y ago
  What warranty process? You are in Central Europe. Seller is in China, no distributor in between. Basically you have no rights, buy it cheap and forget. Warranty lol. Best case for you is to open a case with your credit card vendor or PayPal. But you got what you paid for. As I maker in Europe I don’t feel bad about you, because I must sell everything for insane price with included 2 years warranty. While Chinese not.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
EwanToo 6y ago
You can have a lot of fun with Pi's, but I'm not sure I want to build a multi-TB NAS using a Raspberry Pi with a pretty rare addon board.. If you do want something like this, I think the ODROID-HC4[1] is probably a better option. 1 - https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc4 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc4
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  Or just use USB3 - SATA connectors...
  - fogihujy 6y ago
    Yeah, USB drives with their own power supplies work very well with the Pi, but I can imagine high workloads could quickly run into problems and/or bottlenecks.
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      True, though that bottleneck would mostly be with the Pi itself. After all it only has GbE built-in, a single HD will easily saturate that for sequential loads or all loads for a SSD. I have 8 disks hooked up to a Pi4 through USB3-SATA[1] with external 12V, works quite well in terms of reliability (had to turn on quirks mode[2] though). As I mentioned the main limitation is the single 1GbE interface, but this is just for archive data so. [1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000001204302.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000001204302.html [2]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=245931 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=245931
      - fogihujy 6y ago
        Yep, I've also noticed some unreliability when doing things like adding a mirror drive; at some point the USB controller just seems to fall off the horse and everything crashes. My setup mainly streams video/music over wifi and it's rock solid at lower speeds. I wouldn't rely on it for any heavy duty storage needs though.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  2 disks is pretty limited, is there a 4+ disk version of this?
znpy 6y ago
I wouldnt trust my data with this kind of devices. There's nothing wrong per se, but I have my doubts about how easy you can find replacement parts if something breaks in, say, a year or two. If you really depend on your data and want it to be safe, i'd recommend spending the extra money and either getting a proper nas (synology/qnap) or go the proper diy way (aka an x86 box and truenas/unraid). you really don't want to be in the position where you absolutely need your data but the replacement parts are two-weeks far in the future because they're travelling via snail mail or worse, relying on 2nd-hand spare parts off ebay. edit: not to mention, the gigabit ethernet port is a bottleneck. you would probably hitting the bottleneck even by using four rotational disks.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  If you're concerned about availability of parts, why not just keep some cold spares around? It's not like we're talking about expensive and specialized hardware here.
- dsr_ 6y ago
  As a household backup device, rather than a NAS, this is actually pretty good. Use mdadm RAID-10 across four spinning disks, or RAID-1 across a pair and have two slots free. If the board fails, you can plug them into any other Linux box with SATA ports available. Most people have no better than 1Gb/s ethernet available in their house anyway. One expects a backup or restore to take a while, but also not to be interactive. It's probably cheaper to repurpose an old desktop, but this will probably use less power, even when both are asleep.
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    ECC and zfs/btrfs I think are a must for any data you care about. RAID 1 isn’t going to save you when you can’t tell which copy of the given block is the corrupted one.
    - dsr_ 6y ago
      It completely depends on what your specific circumstances are, and something is always better than nothing. (Also, you aren't getting ECC RAM at this price point, no matter what.) What's a good use case for this? A house with a few laptops, a desktop and one server. Everything uses the server as their datastore. The server runs ZFS, but even ZFS can run out of luck, so you send over a snapshot to the backup device every day or three. It's insurance.
Damogran6 6y ago
A quick google shows eMMC flash memory for the compute module...do you need to mindfully control writing to flash to keep something like this from nuking the boot device? Could be my choice of storage (whatever $4 buys at Microcenter) but the failure mode on my RPi weather station was SD card death. I'd hate to rely on that for a NAS.
- manuel_w 6y ago
  Since some firmware update released in September 2020 it's possible to boot Raspberry Pi 4s from USB. It's a bit cumbersome to piece the info together, but it's there: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711_bootloader_config.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
- cure 6y ago
  You can also boot the pi 4 via kind-of-special-sauce PXE. I wish they had just adopted standard PXE (why do we need a magic string? What the hell is going on with the three spaces in that magic string... Why can't we use the standard PXE way to specify the file to load?), but it's better than nothing. See https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711_bootloader_config.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry... [edit: fixed spelling]
KaiserPro 6y ago
As a cheap offsite destination for backup,(assuming you have multiple destinations) this looks quite compelling. Although I don't think ZFS is stable on the pi just yet[1], so perhaps 4 sata drives is overkill. I would be interested in a single sata/cm4 carrier board though. [1]citation needed, I've not really looked...
smarx007 6y ago
Nothing against cool RPi projects but be aware that a motherboard with a NAS-grade Celeron, like ASRock J4105M, sells for $85 or so (but needs RAM, $20 for 4GB roughly). At $105, this leaves this carrier board around $35 of budget if you can get RPi CM4 4GB for $70. Plus all the doubts about reliability mentioned above.
- 88 6y ago
  Presumably that board will need a separate PSU, RAM, storage for a boot drive, etc? Also it only has two SATA ports so would need a PCIe expansion card to match the four ports offered by the Pi board? I suspect the Pi is also significantly more power efficient?
  - vladvasiliu 6y ago
    There are similar motherboards with 4 SATA ports. I have an older Gigabyte GA-J3455N-D3H with 4 SATA ports and two gigabit network controllers that cost in the same ballpark as GP's model. RAM is accounted for in GP's description. Regarding the boot drive, you can either boot from the data disks (say via a common ZFS pool or a common raid + lvm) or if you're happy with a SD card for the PI, I suppose a small USB drive would do the trick. Regarding the PSU, but you'd need a beefy adapter anyway for running 4 drives, which isn't cheap, and there are cheap pico-atx PSUs available. I bought a compact case + PSU for my board for 50 euros around two years ago [1] that's still going strong (although I'm only running a single SSD in it), so the PSU alone should be less than that. There's of course the power efficiency question and I presume this setup would be somewhat more power hungry than an RPI. The Intel specs for the J3455 give it at 10W TDP. I have no idea how much RAM consumes, but it's likely a few more watts. [0] https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-J3455N-D3H-rev-10#ov https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-J3455N-D3H-rev-10#ov [1] https://www.inter-tech.de/en/products/case/mini-itx-nuc/itx-601 https://www.inter-tech.de/en/products/case/mini-itx-nuc/itx-...
    - tutfbhuf 6y ago
      > Regarding the PSU, but you'd need a beefy adapter anyway for running 4 drives How about 2.5 inch drives? I'm thinking about: https://cdn-reichelt.de/bilder/web/xxl_ws/A300/RPI_NAS_4XSATA_K_04.png https://cdn-reichelt.de/bilder/web/xxl_ws/A300/RPI_NAS_4XSAT...
gorgoiler 6y ago
Nice, but the Gen10 HP ProLiant Microserver is my NAS platform of choice. It supports ECC and has 4 cable-free swappable bays plus space for an SSD system drive in the top. The bolts-as-caddy system is also a great idea.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rsync 6y ago
  My memory is hazy now but there was something weird/screwy about the previous gen Microserver ... like, you couldn't use all four SATA drives at the same time as booting from the onboard ? Or something ? How is the gen10 ? Can I use all four SATA drives for my raid array but still have a SSD/m.2 boot drive ?
  - gorgoiler 6y ago
    I actually never took mine apart to put the SSD in the top slot, I only know it’s possible. (There is an additional mounting kit to support it on the Gen10.) For me, three mirrored ZFS 4TB drives are all I needed for my local storage to be available and resilient. The fourth SATA slot is the SSD in a cradle. My long term bet for safety is offline USB mirrors on-site, Borg off-site to rsync.net (thanks!) and tarsnap off-site for the smaller stuff. Maybe one day I’ll be brave and use ZFS to mirror the content to rsync.net? I haven’t upgraded beyond ZoL 0.7 yet but if I did can I replicate an encrypted pool to you without giving you the keys?
geerlingguy 6y ago
There are a few people currently working on NAS boards based on the CM4. A few different approaches in terms of chipsets used and performance targets. I'm trying to track them in this GitHub issue [1] but a couple people have remained more or less anonymous as they don't want to attract attention too early. The single PCIe lane is the biggest limitation if you're looking for raw speed (350 MB/sec is kind of the upper real-world sustained transfer limit), though since the gigabit Ethernet port is on a different interface, you can still expect to get 80-100 MB/sec network transfer speeds. Something like this, with the right case and OMV or other adequate software would be a relatively competitive replacement for low-end NASes. I'm also exploring building a 2.5G NAS with a CM4, but the PCIe bus speed limitation is what kinda hamstrings that. Hopefully the next Pi revision has a 4x (at least) lane, like the RockPro64. [1] https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/issues/25 https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss...
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  80MB/sec is actually quite fine for most NAS applications. Anyone trying to get 10G speeds out of a high end NAS won’t be looking to Raspberry Pi solutions right now, anyway. The real advantage, IMO, is that this helps kick off the popularity of DIY NAS solutions based on ARM hardware. It’s not the first solution in this space, but Raspberry Pi is great for taking things mainstream. I imagine that a few years from now we’ll have an even faster Raspberry Pi to build a NAS around. These current-gen solutions might be just what we need to get the software sorted out before the powerful hardware arrives.
- youngtaff 6y ago
  Have you come across anyone producing a PoE board for the CM4 - just looking for a network port, USB and perhaps SD card (similar to a Ubquiti Cloud Key)? (the Gumstix camera board is overkill for my needs)
  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    Why not use the regular Raspberry Pi 4 with the PoE module? The CM4 is only useful in most cases if you want to use the PCIe bus for something else, or if you’re trying to embed it in another product.
Nursie 6y ago
That looks a lot like the mainboard from the Western Digital Sharespace I had about 10 years ago. I was recently wanting a NAS again, but came to the conclusion that the best bang for your buck was just grabbing a cheap mini-ITX board and processor as the price of dedicated NAS boxes was not much different and was far less flexible. Then you would have full-fat sata, even m2 for a boot drive, whatever RAM you wanted etc. I know it's not a very exciting solution...
ausjke 6y ago
Use RPi for NAS is really a stretch. Just buy those low-power x86 mini-itx boards with 4GB memory and 4 SATA ports along with gigabit ethernet, they're around $150? Note the smaller size of RPi-etc makes no sense when you're going to host 4 hard drives anyways which takes quite some space on their own, and you need a decent PSU for the drives too, and a solid case as well, etc. Just buy those ASRock mini-itx boards at newsegg or somewhere and let RPi do what it's best at.
Naac 6y ago
Here's what I want, but haven't been able to find: I already have a beefy server at home ( it's actually a refurbished enterprise workstation, with 24 cores, but read on ). However it lacks drives. What I ideally want is a a dumb drive bay I could buy, and then connect ( somehow ) to my existing server, so I could use its CPU and RAM. I don't want this drive bay to have its own CPU, I just want it to hold data and transfer it over some wire. Ideally I would achieve close to gigabit speeds requesting data off of this server/drive bay. Some options I've explored are those dumb quad storage bays that connect over USB-3. But I was worried about running ZFS over a USB interface, as well as potentially parallel read and writes with the quality of the USB controller.
- MrGilbert 6y ago
  Not sure what your workstation offers, but I bought myself an Icy Dock Black Vortex (MB074SP-B) [1]. It's just a case (internal 5,25", but that airflow! :D) which fits 4x3,5" drives with a 120mm fan in front. Slapped some noise damping feets under it. I then bought two low-profile eSATApd to internal SATA slotpanels [2] and 4 corresponding cables [3]. Works great so far! And yes, you need eSATA, because the distance between cage and machine might be enough to introduce read/write errors. That's what I had, because I used normal SATA cables before. [1]: https://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=166 https://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=166 [2]: https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_61725/merkmale.html?setLanguage=en https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_61725/merkmale.html?setLang... [3]: https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_84402/merkmale.html?setLanguage=en https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_84402/merkmale.html?setLang...
- njharman 6y ago
  Man, SCSI daisy chaining did this, what, 30yrs ago.
- francis_t_catte 6y ago
  Hm, rack mounted fiberchannel drive enclosures exist (~$100 used on fleabay, usually sans disk trays), but that'd require a fiberchannel card in your server, direct attach copper (or fiber) cabling, and driver finagling.
- KaiserPro 6y ago
1MachineElf 6y ago
I would still defer to something with ECC RAM and ZFS for keeping my data, but I could see myself using something like this for unimportant data and/or serving important data as a read-only mirror. Either way, I love that an RPi system will soon come in a sweet form-factor optimized for NAS use.
entangledqubit 6y ago
The 12V/5A power supply seems a little undersized for 4 x 3.5 HDD startup. I suspect that it's fine if the drives are started sequentially but the drives will probably want to pull more than 5A if they're all starting simultaneously. Possibly something to watch out for. 5A should be plenty for normal post-start operation.

115 points by tobijkl 6y ago

Title is misleading? End of the article : There’s close to no information about the software right now, and the hardware is not available yet

gitowiec 6y ago

Do not buy ROCK Pi SATA HAT. I own one, and after few months of lite usage with 4 SSDs, one channel (two SSD connectors) has just died. I just installed OpenMediaVault and configured LVM on 2TB, 2x 1TB and .5 TB SSDs, to use it as a home media server. I recently tried to initialize warranty process (I bought it directly from shop.allnetchina.cn with shipping to Central Europe) but I got no replay.

lnsru 6y ago
What warranty process? You are in Central Europe. Seller is in China, no distributor in between. Basically you have no rights, buy it cheap and forget. Warranty lol. Best case for you is to open a case with your credit card vendor or PayPal. But you got what you paid for. As I maker in Europe I don’t feel bad about you, because I must sell everything for insane price with included 2 years warranty. While Chinese not.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

EwanToo 6y ago

You can have a lot of fun with Pi's, but I'm not sure I want to build a multi-TB NAS using a Raspberry Pi with a pretty rare addon board.. If you do want something like this, I think the ODROID-HC4[1] is probably a better option. 1 - https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc4 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc4

magicalhippo 6y ago
Or just use USB3 - SATA connectors...
- fogihujy 6y ago
  Yeah, USB drives with their own power supplies work very well with the Pi, but I can imagine high workloads could quickly run into problems and/or bottlenecks.
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    True, though that bottleneck would mostly be with the Pi itself. After all it only has GbE built-in, a single HD will easily saturate that for sequential loads or all loads for a SSD. I have 8 disks hooked up to a Pi4 through USB3-SATA[1] with external 12V, works quite well in terms of reliability (had to turn on quirks mode[2] though). As I mentioned the main limitation is the single 1GbE interface, but this is just for archive data so. [1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000001204302.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000001204302.html [2]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=245931 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=245931
    - fogihujy 6y ago
      Yep, I've also noticed some unreliability when doing things like adding a mirror drive; at some point the USB controller just seems to fall off the horse and everything crashes. My setup mainly streams video/music over wifi and it's rock solid at lower speeds. I wouldn't rely on it for any heavy duty storage needs though.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
2 disks is pretty limited, is there a 4+ disk version of this?

znpy 6y ago

I wouldnt trust my data with this kind of devices. There's nothing wrong per se, but I have my doubts about how easy you can find replacement parts if something breaks in, say, a year or two. If you really depend on your data and want it to be safe, i'd recommend spending the extra money and either getting a proper nas (synology/qnap) or go the proper diy way (aka an x86 box and truenas/unraid). you really don't want to be in the position where you absolutely need your data but the replacement parts are two-weeks far in the future because they're travelling via snail mail or worse, relying on 2nd-hand spare parts off ebay. edit: not to mention, the gigabit ethernet port is a bottleneck. you would probably hitting the bottleneck even by using four rotational disks.

pmiller2 6y ago
If you're concerned about availability of parts, why not just keep some cold spares around? It's not like we're talking about expensive and specialized hardware here.
dsr_ 6y ago
As a household backup device, rather than a NAS, this is actually pretty good. Use mdadm RAID-10 across four spinning disks, or RAID-1 across a pair and have two slots free. If the board fails, you can plug them into any other Linux box with SATA ports available. Most people have no better than 1Gb/s ethernet available in their house anyway. One expects a backup or restore to take a while, but also not to be interactive. It's probably cheaper to repurpose an old desktop, but this will probably use less power, even when both are asleep.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  ECC and zfs/btrfs I think are a must for any data you care about. RAID 1 isn’t going to save you when you can’t tell which copy of the given block is the corrupted one.
  - dsr_ 6y ago
    It completely depends on what your specific circumstances are, and something is always better than nothing. (Also, you aren't getting ECC RAM at this price point, no matter what.) What's a good use case for this? A house with a few laptops, a desktop and one server. Everything uses the server as their datastore. The server runs ZFS, but even ZFS can run out of luck, so you send over a snapshot to the backup device every day or three. It's insurance.

Damogran6 6y ago

A quick google shows eMMC flash memory for the compute module...do you need to mindfully control writing to flash to keep something like this from nuking the boot device? Could be my choice of storage (whatever $4 buys at Microcenter) but the failure mode on my RPi weather station was SD card death. I'd hate to rely on that for a NAS.

manuel_w 6y ago
Since some firmware update released in September 2020 it's possible to boot Raspberry Pi 4s from USB. It's a bit cumbersome to piece the info together, but it's there: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711_bootloader_config.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
cure 6y ago
You can also boot the pi 4 via kind-of-special-sauce PXE. I wish they had just adopted standard PXE (why do we need a magic string? What the hell is going on with the three spaces in that magic string... Why can't we use the standard PXE way to specify the file to load?), but it's better than nothing. See https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2711_bootloader_config.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry... [edit: fixed spelling]

KaiserPro 6y ago

As a cheap offsite destination for backup,(assuming you have multiple destinations) this looks quite compelling. Although I don't think ZFS is stable on the pi just yet[1], so perhaps 4 sata drives is overkill. I would be interested in a single sata/cm4 carrier board though. [1]citation needed, I've not really looked...

smarx007 6y ago

Nothing against cool RPi projects but be aware that a motherboard with a NAS-grade Celeron, like ASRock J4105M, sells for $85 or so (but needs RAM, $20 for 4GB roughly). At $105, this leaves this carrier board around $35 of budget if you can get RPi CM4 4GB for $70. Plus all the doubts about reliability mentioned above.

88 6y ago
Presumably that board will need a separate PSU, RAM, storage for a boot drive, etc? Also it only has two SATA ports so would need a PCIe expansion card to match the four ports offered by the Pi board? I suspect the Pi is also significantly more power efficient?
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  There are similar motherboards with 4 SATA ports. I have an older Gigabyte GA-J3455N-D3H with 4 SATA ports and two gigabit network controllers that cost in the same ballpark as GP's model. RAM is accounted for in GP's description. Regarding the boot drive, you can either boot from the data disks (say via a common ZFS pool or a common raid + lvm) or if you're happy with a SD card for the PI, I suppose a small USB drive would do the trick. Regarding the PSU, but you'd need a beefy adapter anyway for running 4 drives, which isn't cheap, and there are cheap pico-atx PSUs available. I bought a compact case + PSU for my board for 50 euros around two years ago [1] that's still going strong (although I'm only running a single SSD in it), so the PSU alone should be less than that. There's of course the power efficiency question and I presume this setup would be somewhat more power hungry than an RPI. The Intel specs for the J3455 give it at 10W TDP. I have no idea how much RAM consumes, but it's likely a few more watts. [0] https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-J3455N-D3H-rev-10#ov https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-J3455N-D3H-rev-10#ov [1] https://www.inter-tech.de/en/products/case/mini-itx-nuc/itx-601 https://www.inter-tech.de/en/products/case/mini-itx-nuc/itx-...
  - tutfbhuf 6y ago
    > Regarding the PSU, but you'd need a beefy adapter anyway for running 4 drives How about 2.5 inch drives? I'm thinking about: https://cdn-reichelt.de/bilder/web/xxl_ws/A300/RPI_NAS_4XSATA_K_04.png https://cdn-reichelt.de/bilder/web/xxl_ws/A300/RPI_NAS_4XSAT...

gorgoiler 6y ago

Nice, but the Gen10 HP ProLiant Microserver is my NAS platform of choice. It supports ECC and has 4 cable-free swappable bays plus space for an SSD system drive in the top. The bolts-as-caddy system is also a great idea.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rsync 6y ago
My memory is hazy now but there was something weird/screwy about the previous gen Microserver ... like, you couldn't use all four SATA drives at the same time as booting from the onboard ? Or something ? How is the gen10 ? Can I use all four SATA drives for my raid array but still have a SSD/m.2 boot drive ?
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  I actually never took mine apart to put the SSD in the top slot, I only know it’s possible. (There is an additional mounting kit to support it on the Gen10.) For me, three mirrored ZFS 4TB drives are all I needed for my local storage to be available and resilient. The fourth SATA slot is the SSD in a cradle. My long term bet for safety is offline USB mirrors on-site, Borg off-site to rsync.net (thanks!) and tarsnap off-site for the smaller stuff. Maybe one day I’ll be brave and use ZFS to mirror the content to rsync.net? I haven’t upgraded beyond ZoL 0.7 yet but if I did can I replicate an encrypted pool to you without giving you the keys?

geerlingguy 6y ago

There are a few people currently working on NAS boards based on the CM4. A few different approaches in terms of chipsets used and performance targets. I'm trying to track them in this GitHub issue [1] but a couple people have remained more or less anonymous as they don't want to attract attention too early. The single PCIe lane is the biggest limitation if you're looking for raw speed (350 MB/sec is kind of the upper real-world sustained transfer limit), though since the gigabit Ethernet port is on a different interface, you can still expect to get 80-100 MB/sec network transfer speeds. Something like this, with the right case and OMV or other adequate software would be a relatively competitive replacement for low-end NASes. I'm also exploring building a 2.5G NAS with a CM4, but the PCIe bus speed limitation is what kinda hamstrings that. Hopefully the next Pi revision has a 4x (at least) lane, like the RockPro64. [1] https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/issues/25 https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss...

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
80MB/sec is actually quite fine for most NAS applications. Anyone trying to get 10G speeds out of a high end NAS won’t be looking to Raspberry Pi solutions right now, anyway. The real advantage, IMO, is that this helps kick off the popularity of DIY NAS solutions based on ARM hardware. It’s not the first solution in this space, but Raspberry Pi is great for taking things mainstream. I imagine that a few years from now we’ll have an even faster Raspberry Pi to build a NAS around. These current-gen solutions might be just what we need to get the software sorted out before the powerful hardware arrives.
youngtaff 6y ago
Have you come across anyone producing a PoE board for the CM4 - just looking for a network port, USB and perhaps SD card (similar to a Ubquiti Cloud Key)? (the Gumstix camera board is overkill for my needs)
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  Why not use the regular Raspberry Pi 4 with the PoE module? The CM4 is only useful in most cases if you want to use the PCIe bus for something else, or if you’re trying to embed it in another product.

Nursie 6y ago

That looks a lot like the mainboard from the Western Digital Sharespace I had about 10 years ago. I was recently wanting a NAS again, but came to the conclusion that the best bang for your buck was just grabbing a cheap mini-ITX board and processor as the price of dedicated NAS boxes was not much different and was far less flexible. Then you would have full-fat sata, even m2 for a boot drive, whatever RAM you wanted etc. I know it's not a very exciting solution...

ausjke 6y ago

Use RPi for NAS is really a stretch. Just buy those low-power x86 mini-itx boards with 4GB memory and 4 SATA ports along with gigabit ethernet, they're around $150? Note the smaller size of RPi-etc makes no sense when you're going to host 4 hard drives anyways which takes quite some space on their own, and you need a decent PSU for the drives too, and a solid case as well, etc. Just buy those ASRock mini-itx boards at newsegg or somewhere and let RPi do what it's best at.

Naac 6y ago

Here's what I want, but haven't been able to find: I already have a beefy server at home ( it's actually a refurbished enterprise workstation, with 24 cores, but read on ). However it lacks drives. What I ideally want is a a dumb drive bay I could buy, and then connect ( somehow ) to my existing server, so I could use its CPU and RAM. I don't want this drive bay to have its own CPU, I just want it to hold data and transfer it over some wire. Ideally I would achieve close to gigabit speeds requesting data off of this server/drive bay. Some options I've explored are those dumb quad storage bays that connect over USB-3. But I was worried about running ZFS over a USB interface, as well as potentially parallel read and writes with the quality of the USB controller.

MrGilbert 6y ago
Not sure what your workstation offers, but I bought myself an Icy Dock Black Vortex (MB074SP-B) [1]. It's just a case (internal 5,25", but that airflow! :D) which fits 4x3,5" drives with a 120mm fan in front. Slapped some noise damping feets under it. I then bought two low-profile eSATApd to internal SATA slotpanels [2] and 4 corresponding cables [3]. Works great so far! And yes, you need eSATA, because the distance between cage and machine might be enough to introduce read/write errors. That's what I had, because I used normal SATA cables before. [1]: https://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=166 https://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=166 [2]: https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_61725/merkmale.html?setLanguage=en https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_61725/merkmale.html?setLang... [3]: https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_84402/merkmale.html?setLanguage=en https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_84402/merkmale.html?setLang...
njharman 6y ago
Man, SCSI daisy chaining did this, what, 30yrs ago.
francis_t_catte 6y ago
Hm, rack mounted fiberchannel drive enclosures exist (~$100 used on fleabay, usually sans disk trays), but that'd require a fiberchannel card in your server, direct attach copper (or fiber) cabling, and driver finagling.
KaiserPro 6y ago

1MachineElf 6y ago

I would still defer to something with ECC RAM and ZFS for keeping my data, but I could see myself using something like this for unimportant data and/or serving important data as a read-only mirror. Either way, I love that an RPi system will soon come in a sweet form-factor optimized for NAS use.

entangledqubit 6y ago

The 12V/5A power supply seems a little undersized for 4 x 3.5 HDD startup. I suspect that it's fine if the drives are started sequentially but the drives will probably want to pull more than 5A if they're all starting simultaneously. Possibly something to watch out for. 5A should be plenty for normal post-start operation.