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PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
- icemelt8 5y agoIf I am self hosting, what is Kubesail asking $5 per month for?
- tomputer 5y agoThis looks great! Signed up for the Box 2 mini because it will be manufactured first. If that works well, I'm definitely interested in the Box 5. I hope this can replace my own poor man's Pi4 NAS which has USB storage attached.
- sliken 5y agoI was hoping for a bit better performance. Any suggestions for similar that could max out 4-5 drives, maybe add a M.2/U.2 for caching (or 2), and handle 2.5 gbit ethernet?
- Shank 5y agoIf you want that many drives you’re better off with a proper NAS and a RAID setup imho. If you want an M.2 drive for caching, you’re basically in Synology territory if you throw your other requirements on top. Sure, it’s not running an OS flavored for the Pi, but everything else you want is covered.
- geerlingguy 5y agoDitto—though I'm also testing the Radxa Taco, which is hopefully coming soon. It has a 2.5 Gbps network port and M.2 slot, but the overall bus is still limited to 5 Gbps (3.6 Gbps real-world) because of the Pi's internal PCIe x1 Gen 2 lane. If you really need the sustained performance, especially if you want to use it for things like transcoding, it's better to get more supported hardware.
- jagger27 5y agoIt's stunning how much can be done with a single ancient PCIe 2.0 x1 lane.
- westpfelia 5y agoThe max bus throughput was always something that was the real limit with Pi's. Luckily they are getting better and better. I'm still rocking a first gen Pi as my Pihole. Dont need too much power for dns queries.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoSynology 420+ ticks all of those boxes. I have one and love it.
- sliken 5y agoCan you run debian or similar on the synology 420+ so that when synology dies, merges, abandons the 420+, is bought, or just changes their mind that I can switch to something with updates?
- MichaelBurge 5y agoI think you want a Synology or QNAP device at that point. I bought one of these for $550: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/ts-932px https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/ts-932px 5 HDDs and 4 SSDs for caching, with 10gbit fiber or 2.5gbit ethernet. I have 40 terabytes of storage in mine(21TB free). If I ever fill it up, I'll probably buy an actual storage server with ~500TB of drives.
- sliken 5y agoCan you run debian or similar on the ts-932px so that when synology dies, merges, abandons the ts-932px, is bought, or just changes their mind that I can switch to something with updates?
- MichaelBurge 5y agoThe QNAP OS is already a variant of Linux, so with enough work you could make it run anything you want. I haven't tried or looked for instructions on it, though. But, the data is more important than the OS here. And the filesystem is a variant of ext4 and there's some instructions floating around on how to mount drives on an external standard Linux machine to recover said data in the event of a disaster. You should also back up the data regularly so it doesn't matter if the hardware or company fail.
- sliken 5y agoWell the trick is, can a user do it themselves. Is there a locked bootloader? Proprietary binaries? Etc. I'd be find with a vendor linux, but vendors tend to get bored with older products, drop support, go bankrupt, get purchased, revoke previously promised functionality, have security holes in their addons, etc.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- KennyLogins 5y agoJust finished watching your video on it. I'll be curious to see how the quality improves on the production units. I don't think I'll need 2 8TB drives for it lol but this seems to be one of the better RPI NAS form factors so far.
- geerlingguy 5y agoHeh, the 8 TB drives was more for show than anything else—I actually have them in mind for a separate project but it's more fun saying 16 TB SSD than 4 TB... plus one of my 2 TB Crucial SSDs seems to have burned itself out this week so I guess it's two good things! I hope they make the 3.5" model too, though—it would be more cost effective (and fit the Pi's performance better) to use 3.5" HDDs that are a lot cheaper per GB, and could still easily saturate the 1 Gbps network jack.
- temp8964 5y agoTheir webpage suggests replacing Dropbox with a self-hosted cloud service. I am not confident enough to put all my personal documents on a home NAS server which runs 24/7. It's basically open for hackers in the whole world to scan and eventually put ransomware in it. I feel I am more comfortable with saving my documents on respected cloud service. I do have a NAS at home but its not open to the internet and I don't put my documents on it, just media files.
- corobo 5y agoConnect to it via VPN mate. I like Tailscale for their NAT busting but any old thing will do
- antattack 5y agoWhat's the price of this thing? Kickstarter prompts me to sign in before I can scroll down to see it.
- diskzero 5y ago$100 boards only $250 PiBox Carrier and Daughter Boards Powder Coated Steel Case Noctua 5v PWM Fan External WiFi Antenna 1.3" LCD Display 15W USB-C Wall Adapter Raspberry Pi CM4 - 8GB RAM / 8GB eMMC / WiFi model - Pre-flashed with PiBox OS for easy setup $450 Everything above but with SSD drives installed. Ready to be plugged in and used in seconds. - Includes 2 x Crucial MX500 1TB SSD Drives
- revolvingocelot 5y agoWorth pointing out that for the (not necessarily Faustian) bargain of offering up your email to the "Sign Up & Customize" box, you can access what appears to be post-KS pricing for the planned PiBox fleet. There's a 2x3.5" version, as well as 5-drive SSD and 3.5" versions, the ability to choose which of the Pi CM4 variants you want, etc.
- sudobash1 5y agoThere is a list of other inexpensive arm boards which are Linux compatible here: https://wiki.debian.org/CheapServerBoxHardware https://wiki.debian.org/CheapServerBoxHardware I have been wanting to build my own NAS similar to PiBox Mini, and have been finding this list helpful. Nothing seems as polished as the PiBox though. Best of luck to them.
- synergy20 5y agoA litter pricey, great concepts. For me I will just use a rpi4 with two usb drives for a poor man NAS, that just backup stuff and nothing more, I can do it with less than $60(including housing, 2GB version, fanless)
- sudobash1 5y agoI agree it is a little pricey for something that doesn't come complete with the SOC. I would rather use something like the ODROID-HC4[1]. It isn't as fancy as this or have as broad of support as the RPi, but it is $80. 1: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc4 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc4
- synergy20 5y agoYes that looks very attractive, I am buying one so I don't need run usb cables external to my USB drives which is a bit messy. On the other hand, you can have a USB3.1 hard drive docking station(around $30 for 2 hard drives) to hook into any cheap SBC board that provides a USB3 port. another way to do poorman NAS.
- erulabs 5y agoPiBox is built by us, KubeSail! We're a YC S19 company that focuses on home-hosting and shipping open-source software to customers. Happy to answer any questions!
- geerlingguy 5y agoI spent a little time testing Kubesail when I was testing the PiBox, and I have to say I really liked it. I typically don't run 'managed' solutions for K8s, but the way everything connected together gave me Rancher Labs vibes, it was simple to use and mostly intuitive. With a little more polish I could see myself recommending it to more people, especially in tandem with units like the PiBox.
- anderspitman 5y agoLove the product and hope to see more success in this space. Will it be easy for users to bring their own domain and/or buy one through you, or will they have to use a domain you control to use KubeSail tunneling?
- erulabs 5y agoIt's already nice and easy - users can even add custom domains on our free-tier currently!
- revolvingocelot 5y agoWould you mind addressing this user's concerns [0] regarding the power supply? There's a serious allure to a NAS that actually runs a real OS and not some weird proprietary thing that's going to get pwned [1], and also isn't just a computer that I'm not using anymore. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28993970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28993970 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27713415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27713415
- revolvingocelot 5y ago...too late to edit, but the comment I was trying to bring attention to [0] has received a response by another founder in re power, and the 15w advertised is actually a 17.5w supply [1], according to the parts list of the DIY edition on the Kickstarter page [2], which is apparently enough to supply everything consistently. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28993970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28993970 [1] https://amzn.to/3vEicn7 https://amzn.to/3vEicn7 [2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pastudan/pibox-a-modular-raspberry-pi-storage-server/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pastudan/pibox-a-modula...
- jagger27 5y agoI love everything about this except the included 15W power supply, which seems too low for a CM4, fan, display, two SSDs, and the SATA controller. The CM4 draws somewhere between 7 and 9 watts under peak load, and each SSD would be around 2W under load. That feels pretty tight already. I'm sure it would be totally fine at idle and low loads, but I just can't see it being enough juice at full load with two drives, especially if there are other services running on it and the storage is encrypted.
- pastudan 5y agoWe've done a lot of testing it doesn't get close to 15W of power, and also never trips the low voltage warning with the variety of 15W supplies I've used. We are including a 17.5W power supply with all boards to give it a little extra margin, just in case.
- jagger27 5y agoThat's great, thanks!
- anderspitman 5y agoInteresting. Usually my critique for products like this is something along the lines of "great, but how are you going to access your data from the internet?" Typically the answer to that is you need some sort of tunneling service like ngrok to get around port forwarding, CGNAT, firewalls, etc. I maintain a list of solutions here[0]. The problem with most of these services is that they're targeted at developers and aren't something the average user should have to mess with. In this case, the PiBox is being offered by KubeSail[1], a company which specializes in services like tunneling (they're already on the list mentioned above). It will be very interesting to see if they can bundle it in such a way that people don't have to worry about how the tunneling works. Extra points if they make it easy for users to buy/use their own domains. [0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling [1]: https://kubesail.com/ https://kubesail.com/
- rektide 5y agoi have a systemd cron job (timer) that runs miniupnpc every couple minutes to ask the router to set up firewall rules that a box needs. for now i still manually update my home's dns records whenever there's a power outage and therefore new ip address. but i'll be building something dor dynamic dns soon enough. but a couple boxes also ssh into a vps, and forward their own ssh ports to the vps, so i can jump into them indirectly if the main door/direct ssh way isnt working. this is also an ok way to expose ports on the internet if i want them proxied, if i need rate limiting.
- solarkraft 5y agoDamn, that you need to do all of that ... My router (FritzBox) allows selecting a device to forward specific ports from and even supports DynDNS.
- rektide 5y agoi've maintained router side tables for years. i actually prefer just having devices able to set themselves up. even if i go to a friends house with a system, it should have a good chance of configuring itself there too. that's one huge advantage. mostly though i just dont want the centealization, dont want to be thinking about configuring routers.
- rektide 5y agoit's gonna be amazing when low end a starts packing some real io. some day there'll be more than a lane or two of pcie.
- erulabs 5y agoOhhh yes, we agree strongly. We don't expect to be beating SoftIron.com or anything, but we have some ambitious plans for home-hosting!
- OConnor109 5y agoAnyone know of a similar solution that supports 3.5" drives? I have a bunch of 4 TB externals that I would love to put to use. I know Synology, etc. exist but I don't need something so heavy. Just a simple Pi based case that can take one or two disks would be awesome. Was really looking forward to the Helios 64 but unfortunately, they closed shop: https://kobol.io/ https://kobol.io/
- okasaki 5y agoThe odroid hc4 is basically this but accepts 3.5" drives. https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4-oled/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4-oled/
- _jal 5y agoIt is cute, but I've far outgrown devices like this. Currently on the hunt for a short-depth (<500mm) 19" drive shelf with at least 16 3.5" slots.
- Shish2k 5y agoSame - there seems to be a huge gap in between “home NAS” (2 drives, ~$200) and “enterprise NAS” (16 drives, ~$4000) I’m currently using an old HP microserver (4 x 3.5”), but outgrowing it a bit… My dream is a CM4 board with 2xM2 slots for RAID1 boot drive, and 5+ SATA ports for 3.5” HDDs
- revolvingocelot 5y agoThis is my fear regarding this device. Buy several, learn Kubernetes? :P
- m0zg 5y agoPricing is on the nutty side. You can do a lot better than that for $250 nowadays, though it won't be as compact. That said, I'm looking for something like this but able to take 3.5" hard drives (2 of them) and at half the price. Doesn't need to be pretty or have a screen.
- m0zg 5y agoActually, I was wrong when I said "it won't be as compact". It's even more compact: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/. $73, 2 hard drives.
- AstroDogCatcher 5y agoLooks great - exactly what I've always wanted to do with a Pi. Won't be buying one however, as the price is frankly outrageous; considering what you can get from a NUC or a Lenovo ThinkCentre, I would want to pay no more than £100 for the novel components, then bring my own CM4 and drives.
- erulabs 5y agoIf it's not clear on the kickstarter, there is a $100 bundle that only includes the custom components, and lets you bring your own drives and CM4!
- AstroDogCatcher 5y agoThat doesn't include the case though, which renders this back to the same state as my current Pi estate, ie "bundle of cables and boards too ugly to want to leave out".
- erulabs 5y agoAh fair enough - we are also releasing our case's 3D files so you can easily print your own. I don't believe it's mentioned anywhere, but we're also planning on selling the cases on their own.
- skjoldr 5y agoIt's weird that there is no tier that offers everything from the Standard tier (case, fan, display, power supply etc.) minus CM4. I'd rather trade Wi-Fi capability for more eMMC storage, considering this thing will likely sit right next to my router anyway.
- erulabs 5y agoThis is an interesting suggestion. We actually do plan on selling the case separately, so you could just buy the "Hacker bundle" and the case and you'd be good to go. You can see the customization we plan to offer over at https://pibox.io https://pibox.io - but for the kickstarter we simplified things a bit!
- greenmario 5y agoSo how is this different to existing cloud solutions like Dropbox, Google Drive or iCloud?
- Aachen 5y ago... that you host it? That's like asking how cooking is different from eating out. You do it yourself, you customize all the things, you're independent, it can be cheaper than managed services if you discount your time or even scale it only a little bit, and many people simply enjoy it. And if something goes wrong, you know who's at fault, who's on call, and who's gonna fix it :D (I host my own mail server among other thing, and it's mostly unattended but still I felt I should nuance the comment a little bit.)
- domh 5y agoI recently did something like this myself with an RPi 4 and an external drive over USB to replace Google Photos (with PhotoPrism). For tunneling (and custom domain) I used cloudflared which works surprisingly well: https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared. I wrote about it here: https://domh.dev/blog/replacing-google-photos-with-photoprism https://domh.dev/blog/replacing-google-photos-with-photopris... That being said, I love that someone is working on making this stuff easier to do, it was finicky to get it setup myself. I would be backing it if I hadn't just done it already. I wish Kubesail all the best and I hope they succeed.
- anderspitman 5y agoCloudflare Tunnels is currently my recommendation for most people. Not only is it free, it will also manage DNS records and HTTPS for you very easily. My main concern is that when it comes to self-hosting photos and videos, that's against the TOS for Cloudflare's free tier. If enough people start using it I assume they'll crack down. Bandwidth isn't free.
- k8sToGo 5y agoI hope you also mention the implications when using Cloudflare when you recommend it: That it is basically MITM and has access to all of your data. But I am also not sure why I'd want to expose my photos and videos to the internet. Just use a VPN of some sort.
- sneak 5y agoNot everyone stays at home 24/7. "Just" using a VPN of some sort means you a) need your mobile device connected to it at all times you wish to access your private resources, and b) can't be connected to some other VPN for privacy purposes.
- anderspitman 5y agoI'm not aware of many tunneling services that offer e2ee. My own boringproxy[0] does. In any case, the MITM issue you mention is no different of a risk profile than storing your data on google drive or icloud, which is what most people are currently doing. Hosting through Cloudflare on a domain you own isn't perfect, but it's a big step in the right direction. > But I am also not sure why I'd want to expose my photos and videos to the internet I often share photos and videos with others, whether actually allowing them access directly through their device, or pulling images up on my phone to show them in person. [0]: https://boringproxy.io/ https://boringproxy.io/
- paranoidrobot 5y agoI'm looking for something like this, but cheaper and for 3.5" drives. USD$250, plus shipping to Australia puts that just too high for what it offers. I own Synology NASs, but adding an expander for that is expensive. (AUD$800) The ODroid-HC4 looks promising, but their 'toaster' case design for it is awful, leaving the drives exposed and unable to put two atop each other. Ideally what I'd like is: - 1-2x 3.5" SATA drives - Gbit NIC - Enough grunt to run some kind of clustered filesystem (gluster, ceph, whatever) The idea being that I could start a cluster with say 3x of these devices, and then as my storage needs grow - add more. They don't need to have stellar IO, but enough to keep up with plex.
- funkaster 5y agoI bought a rockpro64 and a NAS case with space for 4 drives, I added a 4xSATA PCIe card. Right now it's a 4x4TB ZFS setup that has been running as my own home storage for over a year continuously. Very happy with it.
- normaler 5y agoWhat kind oft write speeds do you get on zfs? I also have a rockpro64 with two 8tb WD red pro and in subvolumes with encryption i only get 70MB and in non encrypted 110MB. I already switched from aes256-gcm (the default) to aes256-ccm, since that is less taxing ob the CPU. I Start to get the feeling that zfs arm is not yet optimised enough.
- pxeboot 5y agoI was just looking for something like this, but I would prefer to use NVMe disks, which are now natively supported with the Compute Module 4.
- Aa9C4xPz43Gg7k6 5y agoWhy? CM4 would still be externally accessible through 1Gbit/s.
- pxeboot 5y agoMostly size and power consumption. Four NVMe drives could almost fit in a traditional size Raspberry Pi case. It looks like it is also possible to do 2.5Gbit Ethernet on the CM4 [1]. [1] https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/cards_network/rosewill-rc20001-25gbe.html https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/cards_network/rosewill-rc2000...
- skjoldr 5y agoPi has limited PCIe lanes to devote to additional controllers. PiBox lacks USB3 for this reason -- all the throughput is already filled by SATA3. 2.5Gbit is likely to be mutually exclusive to either.
- ale42 5y agonot sure it's just a throughput question... the thing is, there's only a single PCIe lane exposed, and multiplexing it to multiple devices (i.e. a SATA controller plus a USB3 controller) requires more electronics, and of course the bandwidth will have to be shared between the devices
- smcleod 5y agoI'm assuming the IO would be pretty limited? I'm looking for a simple DAS/NAS for 5-10 2.5" SSDs to attach either via a couple of 1gbit links, usb 3.(0/1) of a SAS connector (that could connect to a computer with a SAS/SATA controller running in HBA/JBOD mode.) but there doesn't seem to be much out there in the 2.5" space.
- Rogelio123 5y agoEverything is very open with a clear description of the issues. It was truly informative. https://www.mcdvoice.fyi/ https://www.mcdvoice.fyi/
- miguelrochefort 5y agoA promising OS for this is Umbrel: https://getumbrel.com/ https://getumbrel.com/
- ggm 5y agoI have the Radxa 4 port SATA HAT, which is a USB mediated drive path via a double USB connector. I'm running ZFS on ubuntu over 4x 2tb shucked portable drives. If you can make this use some PCI path to the drives, and support 2.5" laptops or SSDs, then you're on the same journey to a better story. Radaxa have a vertical chassis, with a fan. It runs the fan a LOT. I suspect driving disks is hot work. https://wiki.radxa.com/Dual_Quad_SATA_HAT https://wiki.radxa.com/Dual_Quad_SATA_HAT
- rlt 5y agoHow does the performance of this (really the CM4) compare to say, a consumer NAS from Synology or QNAP?
- markvdb 5y ago"PiBox is a product in active & open devleopment by KubeSail, Inc." s/devleopment/development/
- LTheobald 5y agoMy major worry here is how they'll get their hands on enough CM4's. Aren't they like gold-dust at the moment? Lots of similar projects have stalled recently because the supplies just aren't there. Is the KickStart going to finish, we'll all get charged $250 but no product will be able to ship for several months to a year past the expected date?
- ThinkBeat 5y agoI love the idea of getting rid of online storage. I do have experience with a lot of HDs failing in NASs. Primary the value for me in storing my 260.000 (approximate actual number) somewhere online is the reliability it gives. So far with the services I use I have had 0 data loss. I also have my photos stored in my home but now I do not have to worry about losing precious data if the storage dies. (apart from restoring / syncing from the cloud can take a very loooooong time, and depending on service might also cost a lot from bsndwith usage) Doing local backups is prudent, if a bit complicated if your storage is in the 10TB - 200TB range. Ten rotate keep at least one off site. I wish I could afford some of the new streamers, they can fit a lot of data into a small space.
- littlestymaar 5y agoThe idea is cool. That price though…
- jsilence 5y agoWondering if FreedomBox is a good fit for this device. Would love to see someone pre-configure it.
- wiz21c 5y agoWhy does it need a CM4 ? I would have thought that a storage server doesn't require much CPU... Maybe it does more than that ?
- dvdkon 5y agoThe website also advertises running software other than a NFS/SMB/SFTP server, it's presumably for that. You might also be surprised how much CPU power something boring like Samba can use. Finally, an entry-level CM4 costs about the same as the cheapest well-supported SBC, IIRC.
- perryizgr8 5y agoIt's nice to see projects like this, because IMO NAS companies like Synology are really overcharging. I have a tangential question however, regarding the google photos alternative mentioned in the marketing. Has anyone managed to properly replace google photos with a self-hosted solution? It should: 1. have first class Android and Ios apps 2. should have auto-upload from mobile apps 3. should have share functionality between users, so I can share with my family 4. have a nice web/native app that lets me browse and manage pics on a computer I understand that it is tough for open-source/free projects to build and maintain mobile apps (due to store fees etc). However, I think this is a big problem and I'm ready to pay for such software. Just not a subscription like google photos.
- ecksii 5y agoThis looks great as a portable NAS device. I could run it using Raspbian or whatever will run on the rpi. For me it would be perfect if there was a TrueNAS port to arm hardware that could run on the pi. As it is, I use a 2GB pi4 in an argon m.2 case as a traveling NAS. I run FreeBSD on that and it's not so much of a NAS as it is an NFS server.