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The headline buries the lede: It’s a NAS build that uses expensive SSDs. I’m looking forward to the day that I can retire my spinning-disk NAS, but at $700 per

The headline buries the lede: It’s a NAS build that uses expensive SSDs. I’m looking forward to the day that I can retire my spinning-disk NAS, but at $700 per 8TB SSD I think it’s going to be a while before they’re cheap enough that I want to take that leap. Like this article concludes: Using a Raspberry Pi for an SSD NAS is a huge waste. There are plenty of low-power Mini-ITX or smaller x86 boards with substantially more compute power than the Pi.

hinkley 5y ago
It's starting to look like we'll get spinning rust that speaks NVME, which will let people transition to SSD more gracefully.
dragontamer 5y ago
Hard drives can easily saturate a 1Gbps link. And RAIDed hard drives can saturate 5Gbps or even 10Gbps with enough parallelism. I'm not sure if any NAS is cost-effective when you use SSDs, aside from maybe a cost-effective SSD cache (Maybe a $100 to $250 1TB L2ARC cache, depending on the speed of the SSD you get).
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  Indeed, the board in the video (Radxa Taco, hopefully for sale next month) would actually make a decent 1 Gbps NAS (with a 2nd 2.5G port if you want to also use it as a router or have higher network storage speed for short bursts) for HDDs. Most of the average NAS HDDs top out at speeds that are within the Pi's performance realm, though software RAID and ZFS both bottleneck a bit, so you can't get a full 2.5 Gbps (2.3 Gbps real-world) through the Pi to the disks.
  - Bluecobra 5y ago
    Interesting, I have an old HP MicroServer laying around gathering dust. It only has a dual core AMD Turion (like Intel Atom) and 4Gb of memory. It should be easy to retrofit this with a Pi, in fact there's an empty 5.25" drive bay on this case.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
> I’m looking forward to the day that I can retire my spinning-disk NAS, but at $700 per 8TB SSD I think it’s going to be a while before they’re cheap enough that I want to take that leap. It's not just the price - SSDs are not a good choice for long-term storage, especially if they're not powered up continuously.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  In practice, I don't really care about those SSD limitations. Modern SSDs last long enough that I can cheaply upgrade in 5 years to something else before any of the drives likely fail. If one or even two drives fail, I'm covered by Raid-Z2. Continuously powering solid-state drives is really not a big deal. The 10 Gigabit ethernet adapter in my NAS would probably have more idle power draw than 6-8 idle SSDs combined. The entire system barely pulls 20-25W at idle.
- _zoltan_ 5y ago
  I've heard about the same thing, but I have yet to see evidence of this. I have an old SSD on the shelf that I may be power up every 1.5 years or so, and so far, it works fine. It's around 8 years old.
  - rasz 5y ago
    8 year old SSD was manufactured on huge (by todays standards) lithography, and was most likely MLC.
MuffinFlavored 5y ago
> The headline buries the lede: It’s a NAS build that uses expensive SSDs. What percentage of the cost is the NAS components?

hinkley 5y ago

It's starting to look like we'll get spinning rust that speaks NVME, which will let people transition to SSD more gracefully.

dragontamer 5y ago

Hard drives can easily saturate a 1Gbps link. And RAIDed hard drives can saturate 5Gbps or even 10Gbps with enough parallelism. I'm not sure if any NAS is cost-effective when you use SSDs, aside from maybe a cost-effective SSD cache (Maybe a $100 to $250 1TB L2ARC cache, depending on the speed of the SSD you get).

geerlingguy 5y ago
Indeed, the board in the video (Radxa Taco, hopefully for sale next month) would actually make a decent 1 Gbps NAS (with a 2nd 2.5G port if you want to also use it as a router or have higher network storage speed for short bursts) for HDDs. Most of the average NAS HDDs top out at speeds that are within the Pi's performance realm, though software RAID and ZFS both bottleneck a bit, so you can't get a full 2.5 Gbps (2.3 Gbps real-world) through the Pi to the disks.
- Bluecobra 5y ago
  Interesting, I have an old HP MicroServer laying around gathering dust. It only has a dual core AMD Turion (like Intel Atom) and 4Gb of memory. It should be easy to retrofit this with a Pi, in fact there's an empty 5.25" drive bay on this case.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

> I’m looking forward to the day that I can retire my spinning-disk NAS, but at $700 per 8TB SSD I think it’s going to be a while before they’re cheap enough that I want to take that leap. It's not just the price - SSDs are not a good choice for long-term storage, especially if they're not powered up continuously.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
In practice, I don't really care about those SSD limitations. Modern SSDs last long enough that I can cheaply upgrade in 5 years to something else before any of the drives likely fail. If one or even two drives fail, I'm covered by Raid-Z2. Continuously powering solid-state drives is really not a big deal. The 10 Gigabit ethernet adapter in my NAS would probably have more idle power draw than 6-8 idle SSDs combined. The entire system barely pulls 20-25W at idle.
_zoltan_ 5y ago
I've heard about the same thing, but I have yet to see evidence of this. I have an old SSD on the shelf that I may be power up every 1.5 years or so, and so far, it works fine. It's around 8 years old.
- rasz 5y ago
  8 year old SSD was manufactured on huge (by todays standards) lithography, and was most likely MLC.

MuffinFlavored 5y ago

> The headline buries the lede: It’s a NAS build that uses expensive SSDs. What percentage of the cost is the NAS components?