8 ms·

The Wiretrustee SATA Pi board is a true SATA NAS

83 points by geerlingguy 5y ago

arbitrage 5y ago
This is not available. Someone (thanks, jeff!) just posted this in the comments: "The day I finished editing the video for the Wiretrustee SATA, the folks behind the board announced they were postponing production because of the component shortage—some parts, most notably the SATA controller chip, had increased in price dramatically, and would only be available in small quantities." Just more rPI vapourware. Maybe repost when someone can actually get their hands on this?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  I think it's not fair to hold against them something that's affecting Ford and Apple too...
  - anoonmoose 5y ago
    Are you under the impression that if I walked into an Apple store or a Ford dealership today with cash, that I would not be able to leave with a new laptop or car?
    - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
      Depending who you try to order it from, you may be backordered for a month or two trying to order an iPad, yes. Ford has shut down some of their factories because they can't get their hands on parts. For very large companies, stock still exists, especially if built over the last year or two, but as shortages continue, in the near future, you may, in fact, not be able to leave a Ford dealership with a new car.
      - anoonmoose 5y ago
        That's all very different from "you can't buy this, right this second".
wyager 5y ago
With ZFS allowing for very robust data integrity on disk, the weak point in most budget NAS setups these days is going to be memory errors. It’s unfortunate that there are so few low-end options with any kind of ECC. The PCEngines APU2 has an ECC option, but it does not have the appropriate I/O for redundant storage.
- 3np 5y ago
  If you're doing ZFS where that I/O bandwidth is a limiting factor, I'm thinking the 4GB of the APU2 makes it not interesting for ZFS in the first place (depending on the workloads of course, but you're probably going to want a bigger ARC). I can see it work well as a sink for automated replicated snapshots, where I/O performance is not that critical.
  - dsr_ 5y ago
    Yup. Use mdadm to do RAID5, 6 or 10 and let it sit in your friend's place as a target for encrypted snapshots; do the same in exchange and you both have reliable offsite backups. If you need a big restore, go get the machine physically and bring it back to your network for full gigabit speeds.
  - blibble 5y ago
    unless you have several hundred TB, 4GB should be fine it's quite happy with a 40tb array I have on a 2010 server with 4GB of ram (and I've run ZFS on every laptop I've owned in the last decade or so)
  - wyager 5y ago
    ZFS works fine these days in low-RAM environments. As you say, you won’t benefit much from ARC, but for most NAS workloads that is fine.
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  The two problems I see are ZFS really wants a bit of a beefier machine, plus all the RAM you can throw at it. That pretty much excludes anything low end by default (not to mention more expensive ECC memory).
3np 5y ago
This is really cool, except for not being available yet. The most interesting available in this category and price class I've been are otherwise Odroid HC4 (2xSATA + USB2.0 + microSD. I have one for backups) and RockPi's 2/4/5 SATA hats. One step up in price and Kobol Helios64 looks really nice as well (also unavailable, though).
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  Everywhere I look lately, it seems like things are not available (or if they are, for a bit of a markup—I needed a spare 8 TB hard drive, and the price is up about 30% from a couple months ago!). I hope this current component shortage and crypto bull market both end soon.
  - 3np 5y ago
    Yup, same. I really don't think the crypto mining/chia are as much to blame as people make it out to be here, though. For GPUs it's absolutely been a major factor, but the general component shortage combined with supply chain issues caused by the pandemic are more likely the cause I think. Maybe specifically for SBCs and NUCs, I can be wrong and people running their own nodes are actually making a difference. I doubt it, since manufacturers and vendors are all citing shortage upstream rather than increased demand, but if that's the case I think That's Just A Good Thing, setting the stage for more digital independence and decentralization in general.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  For this type of application, check out used HP t5xx or t6xx thin clients. They are great little boxes that usually have 2 M2 slots and USB3. Usually they are <$100 and better all around than a Pi like device for this application.
  - syntheticnature 5y ago
    For this application? Even with adapters to connect m.2 to the desired spinning rust drives, which probably can't be used with the case closed, that only gets you two SATA connections, not four. The argument can be made quite well that there are better alternatives to the Pi for a low-end NAS, but the HP slimline thin clients don't look like it.
ulzeraj 5y ago
To me the issue with RPis storage is the lack of hardware encryption. No matter how much you increase its I/O capabilities it won't be able to use disk encryption without having to rely on CPU cycles.
- tcas 5y ago
  I'm still surprised that they did not include a crypto accelerator on the Pi4. It seems like a very low cost peripheral, with a high performance impact for many use cases (drive encryption, network encryption, etc...). I ran some benchmarks between a Pi4 and a Nanopi M4 and it wasn't even close.
  - _joel 5y ago
    Did you try different ciphers? Whilst there's no AES acceleration there are other ciphers that can leverage the hardware better. i.e. ChaCha20
    - tcas 5y ago
      Not really, I mostly cared about AES which was around 25x faster. Here's what a NanoPi M4 does: Cryptsetup # Algorithm | Key | Encryption | Decryption aes-cbc 128b 465.5 MiB/s 654.0 MiB/s OpenSSL Speed for ChaCha type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes 16384 bytes chacha20-poly1305 85242.48k 144024.55k 265936.64k 309418.33k 317977.94k 317658.45k vs Pi4 Cryptsetup # Algorithm | Key | Encryption | Decryption aes-cbc 128b 18.9 MiB/s 31.9 MiB/s OpenSSL Speed for ChaCha type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes 16384 bytes chacha20-poly1305 24833.53k 55555.22k 90574.34k 99022.17k 102659.41k 100592.30k
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - _joel 5y ago
ppf 5y ago
So close to what I want. I want something I can use as a "home server", with a priority on having as much control over the hardware as possible. Ideally, it would be an interesting project to design one, but I suspect that the result would be exactly like the rpi (but badly executed).
themodelplumber 5y ago
Did anybody else skim the headlines and wonder if a board of trustees had really been replaced by a NAS?
rektide 5y ago
I keep hoping some day the drives will have their own networking built in. Kioxia, a Toshiba spin off, announced a network-attached NVMe-oF drive last September[1], and I seem to recall one of the major drive players had similar intents a bit back... ah yes, the Seagate Kinetic drives with dual 1Gbit[2] & an object storage OS built in to the drive. These days Seagate seems to be pushing a software platform CORTX[3], which I hope some day perhaps has hardware products too (but right now seems to be for classic linux-based network appliances) Ideally we start using 5 or 10Gbit ethernet for these cases. We could continue to treat these drives like they are direct attached, even though they are network attached, and either have one computer running RAID, or have Ceph and a bunch of computers running it's distributed system to tap the drives. Ideally though, we need new clustered file-systems, where any computer can read the drives. That is, I'd guess, a long way off. Legacy devices (home media players) would need to go through some kind of legacy gateway. [1] https://business.kioxia.com/en-us/news/2020/ssd-20200922-2.html https://business.kioxia.com/en-us/news/2020/ssd-20200922-2.h... [2] https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/MayurShelty_Seagate-Kinetic.pdf https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/MayurShelty_Seagate... [3] https://github.com/Seagate/cortx https://github.com/Seagate/cortx
hughrr 5y ago
I would buy this in an instant once someone posts a review for a complete unit. This fixes the main problem I have with the RPi which is crappy storage support.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sneak 5y ago
I don't think the Pi's cpu has any sort of AES acceleration instructions (such as aes-ni on intel), which means that doing FDE is likely going to bottleneck this pretty badly.
natural219 5y ago
Very cool! There’s lots of great business ideas that could use something like this.

83 points by geerlingguy 5y ago

This is not available. Someone (thanks, jeff!) just posted this in the comments: "The day I finished editing the video for the Wiretrustee SATA, the folks behind the board announced they were postponing production because of the component shortage—some parts, most notably the SATA controller chip, had increased in price dramatically, and would only be available in small quantities." Just more rPI vapourware. Maybe repost when someone can actually get their hands on this?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
I think it's not fair to hold against them something that's affecting Ford and Apple too...
- anoonmoose 5y ago
  Are you under the impression that if I walked into an Apple store or a Ford dealership today with cash, that I would not be able to leave with a new laptop or car?
  - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
    Depending who you try to order it from, you may be backordered for a month or two trying to order an iPad, yes. Ford has shut down some of their factories because they can't get their hands on parts. For very large companies, stock still exists, especially if built over the last year or two, but as shortages continue, in the near future, you may, in fact, not be able to leave a Ford dealership with a new car.
    - anoonmoose 5y ago
      That's all very different from "you can't buy this, right this second".

wyager 5y ago

With ZFS allowing for very robust data integrity on disk, the weak point in most budget NAS setups these days is going to be memory errors. It’s unfortunate that there are so few low-end options with any kind of ECC. The PCEngines APU2 has an ECC option, but it does not have the appropriate I/O for redundant storage.

3np 5y ago
If you're doing ZFS where that I/O bandwidth is a limiting factor, I'm thinking the 4GB of the APU2 makes it not interesting for ZFS in the first place (depending on the workloads of course, but you're probably going to want a bigger ARC). I can see it work well as a sink for automated replicated snapshots, where I/O performance is not that critical.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  Yup. Use mdadm to do RAID5, 6 or 10 and let it sit in your friend's place as a target for encrypted snapshots; do the same in exchange and you both have reliable offsite backups. If you need a big restore, go get the machine physically and bring it back to your network for full gigabit speeds.
- blibble 5y ago
  unless you have several hundred TB, 4GB should be fine it's quite happy with a 40tb array I have on a 2010 server with 4GB of ram (and I've run ZFS on every laptop I've owned in the last decade or so)
- wyager 5y ago
  ZFS works fine these days in low-RAM environments. As you say, you won’t benefit much from ARC, but for most NAS workloads that is fine.
geerlingguy 5y ago
The two problems I see are ZFS really wants a bit of a beefier machine, plus all the RAM you can throw at it. That pretty much excludes anything low end by default (not to mention more expensive ECC memory).

3np 5y ago

This is really cool, except for not being available yet. The most interesting available in this category and price class I've been are otherwise Odroid HC4 (2xSATA + USB2.0 + microSD. I have one for backups) and RockPi's 2/4/5 SATA hats. One step up in price and Kobol Helios64 looks really nice as well (also unavailable, though).

geerlingguy 5y ago
Everywhere I look lately, it seems like things are not available (or if they are, for a bit of a markup—I needed a spare 8 TB hard drive, and the price is up about 30% from a couple months ago!). I hope this current component shortage and crypto bull market both end soon.
- 3np 5y ago
  Yup, same. I really don't think the crypto mining/chia are as much to blame as people make it out to be here, though. For GPUs it's absolutely been a major factor, but the general component shortage combined with supply chain issues caused by the pandemic are more likely the cause I think. Maybe specifically for SBCs and NUCs, I can be wrong and people running their own nodes are actually making a difference. I doubt it, since manufacturers and vendors are all citing shortage upstream rather than increased demand, but if that's the case I think That's Just A Good Thing, setting the stage for more digital independence and decentralization in general.
Spooky23 5y ago
For this type of application, check out used HP t5xx or t6xx thin clients. They are great little boxes that usually have 2 M2 slots and USB3. Usually they are <$100 and better all around than a Pi like device for this application.
- syntheticnature 5y ago
  For this application? Even with adapters to connect m.2 to the desired spinning rust drives, which probably can't be used with the case closed, that only gets you two SATA connections, not four. The argument can be made quite well that there are better alternatives to the Pi for a low-end NAS, but the HP slimline thin clients don't look like it.

ulzeraj 5y ago

To me the issue with RPis storage is the lack of hardware encryption. No matter how much you increase its I/O capabilities it won't be able to use disk encryption without having to rely on CPU cycles.

tcas 5y ago
I'm still surprised that they did not include a crypto accelerator on the Pi4. It seems like a very low cost peripheral, with a high performance impact for many use cases (drive encryption, network encryption, etc...). I ran some benchmarks between a Pi4 and a Nanopi M4 and it wasn't even close.
- _joel 5y ago
  Did you try different ciphers? Whilst there's no AES acceleration there are other ciphers that can leverage the hardware better. i.e. ChaCha20
  - tcas 5y ago
    Not really, I mostly cared about AES which was around 25x faster. Here's what a NanoPi M4 does: Cryptsetup # Algorithm | Key | Encryption | Decryption aes-cbc 128b 465.5 MiB/s 654.0 MiB/s OpenSSL Speed for ChaCha type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes 16384 bytes chacha20-poly1305 85242.48k 144024.55k 265936.64k 309418.33k 317977.94k 317658.45k vs Pi4 Cryptsetup # Algorithm | Key | Encryption | Decryption aes-cbc 128b 18.9 MiB/s 31.9 MiB/s OpenSSL Speed for ChaCha type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes 16384 bytes chacha20-poly1305 24833.53k 55555.22k 90574.34k 99022.17k 102659.41k 100592.30k
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - _joel 5y ago

ppf 5y ago

So close to what I want. I want something I can use as a "home server", with a priority on having as much control over the hardware as possible. Ideally, it would be an interesting project to design one, but I suspect that the result would be exactly like the rpi (but badly executed).

themodelplumber 5y ago

Did anybody else skim the headlines and wonder if a board of trustees had really been replaced by a NAS?

rektide 5y ago

I keep hoping some day the drives will have their own networking built in. Kioxia, a Toshiba spin off, announced a network-attached NVMe-oF drive last September[1], and I seem to recall one of the major drive players had similar intents a bit back... ah yes, the Seagate Kinetic drives with dual 1Gbit[2] & an object storage OS built in to the drive. These days Seagate seems to be pushing a software platform CORTX[3], which I hope some day perhaps has hardware products too (but right now seems to be for classic linux-based network appliances) Ideally we start using 5 or 10Gbit ethernet for these cases. We could continue to treat these drives like they are direct attached, even though they are network attached, and either have one computer running RAID, or have Ceph and a bunch of computers running it's distributed system to tap the drives. Ideally though, we need new clustered file-systems, where any computer can read the drives. That is, I'd guess, a long way off. Legacy devices (home media players) would need to go through some kind of legacy gateway. [1] https://business.kioxia.com/en-us/news/2020/ssd-20200922-2.html https://business.kioxia.com/en-us/news/2020/ssd-20200922-2.h... [2] https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/MayurShelty_Seagate-Kinetic.pdf https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/MayurShelty_Seagate... [3] https://github.com/Seagate/cortx https://github.com/Seagate/cortx

hughrr 5y ago

I would buy this in an instant once someone posts a review for a complete unit. This fixes the main problem I have with the RPi which is crappy storage support.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sneak 5y ago

I don't think the Pi's cpu has any sort of AES acceleration instructions (such as aes-ni on intel), which means that doing FDE is likely going to bottleneck this pretty badly.

natural219 5y ago

Very cool! There’s lots of great business ideas that could use something like this.