15 ms·
Evercube
- iloveponies 15y agoI can't find the schematics for it, despite them apparently being CC licensed.
- timlossen 15y agoright, i'll upload them this evening -- was in a bit of a rush yesterday :)
- iloveponies 15y agoExcellent, I was considering making my own with a perspex chassis.
- timlossen 15y agoi would love to see the perspex chassis, if you get around to build it ... the design specs (including parts list) are up now: https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.evercu.be/evercube.20111102.zip https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.evercu.be/evercube.20111102.z...
- shin_lao 15y agoVery nice, is it possible to boost the RAM to 1 GiB without ruining the whole design? This box would be perfect with FreeBSD + ZFS (as you say in the text).
- timlossen 15y agoi am afraid that would be very hard -- the sheeva board comes with soldered RAM.
- morsch 15y agoVery nice. Looks fantastic. Put a second Ethernet port on it and let me use it as a NAS/Router box. That would be really cool. I'd like a NAS, but I'd also desperately like to ditch my DSL router. What's the average (idle) power draw like? The PSU is rated for 20W (output, I guess). This seems to be just enough, since current 2.5" drives draw up to 4W when starting (are you doing a staggered spinup?). For a single drive, idle consumption should be below 1W. So I guess idle power should be way below 10W? More like 5W? That sounds good for an always-on appliance. At those loads, I'm sure the system is virtually silent, particularly given the humongous fan. The fan grill looks like it would block a huge amount of the airflow, but I guess it's not much of an issue. Does the fan pull air in or blow it out? It would be really nice if everything could go no-moving-parts during idle periods, ie. fan turned off and all HDDs spun down. Sadly, even with a second ethernet port, I probably won't be in the market, it's just too expensive for me. But I'm sure you'll be able to sell a few batches to the MBP toting internet nouveaux riches in Berlin. :) As a bonus, it's small enough to bring along to the Wifi equipped coffee shop. SCNR.
- ch0wn 15y agoI'd also be very interested in knowing the average power consumption, especially for a device designed to be always on.
- timlossen 15y agoaverage power consumption is between 10 and 20 watts, depending on the number and model of disks.
- morsch 15y agoSorry, but that isn't saying much. Average power consumption doing what? Or is that range meant to be the minimum and maximum draw, ie. idle power draw 10W, loaded power draw 20W? I don't see why the device should draw 10W with idle disks, much less with spun-down disks.
- sbierwagen 15y agoSeriously — laptop disks in a server? It might sound strange, but laptop disks actually have a lot of advantages for an always-on home server: they use less energy, run very quiet, and take up little space. Although you pay roughly double the price per gigabyte compared to 3.5" disks, you pay less for electricity, and thus save money in the long run. I seriously doubt the power savings over the lifespan of a hard drive (5-6 years) are greater than paying twice as much per gigabyte. After all, if they were, Backblaze themselves would be using 2.5" disks. In any event, the disks in a home storage server are going to be spending most of their time spun down, and drawing very little power.
- weiran 15y agoThe other advantages he mentioned (reduced heat, vibration, and as a consequence noise) would outweigh the price difference for a "living room" storage server. I certainly wouldn't want multiple 3.5" HDDs in my living room...
- sdfjkl 15y agoThe disks are quiet, but the cooling fans they often require are not (at least that's what I've learnt from having a Drobo with four 3.5" disks in my living room).
- timlossen 15y agothats why i use an ultra-silent 140mm fan ... running it at 5V (instead of 12V) makes it practically unhearable.
- DanBC 15y agoWhy do hard-drives, in a small home server, need cooling fans?
- pdubs 15y agoThey probably don't. http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
- fijter 15y agoThe design is nice, but why buy this thing for €429 excl. disks if you can buy a Synology DS211 with 2x2GB for the same price including the great diskstation software? Ok, the design is nice, but hey, it's a NAS, you can just go ahead and hide it somewhere, there's no real need for it to be on a desk or in a living room.
- Terretta 15y agoI'm with you. Infrant ReadyNAS, LaCie 4big Quadra, etc., there are a lot of really reliable and known high performance (needed for high volumes of DSLR images or 1080P video) chassis designs out there in the 430 Euro USD 600 price range.
- doublerebel 15y agoYes, and many of those devices come setup with very reliable RAID without any special configuration by the user. Running 5 1TB disks with no redundancy on standard Ubuntu ext4 is like pleading for data loss. With the Evercube, I pay double for 2.5" storage and have no redundancy? 5TB of storage but only 512MB for the OS? At those prices the OS storage should be at least 1GB so that users have more options. Standard Ubuntu Minimal requires a lot of manual configuration (no room for GUI in 512MB), especially if you want network sharing and RAID. Then, because it's Ubuntu I can guarantee that there will be major changes in the configuration process at the next version upgrade. Compare this with ZFS on BSD/Solaris which exports NFS shares with a single command. Upgrade process is predictable and requires little intervention. Or compare with my setup: Arch Linux with ZFS-FUSE in RAIDZ2 configuration: 4x2TB HDD = 7TB of storage that can survive dual drive failure. And just the Evercube shell without drives costs much more than my setup! Whoever buys the Evercube will be looking for a pretty solution instead of a technically solid one. Ubuntu 9.04 is outdated and no longer supported. To spend this money and go this far on design on hardware, and then fall so flat on software is really disappointing.
- FireBeyond 15y ago"Arch Linux with ZFS-FUSE in RAIDZ2 configuration: 4x2TB HDD = 7TB of storage that can survive dual drive failure." Uhh, 4 x 2TB raidz2 will give you 3.6TB of storage...
- i_crusade 15y agoProbably obvious for the server folks, but can you tell how you created the enclosure? Is there a company in Berlin?
- alexchamberlain 15y agoThis is awesome, but totally overpriced. It's a shame, because this is exactly the sort of hardware people need to start using in the home. I suspect the case is slightly overengineered - an extruded aluminium case may have even given a better finish. Also, Ubuntu on a NAS? Overkill?
- alexchamberlain 15y agoI may have misunderstood slightly... please ignore the Ubuntu comment.
- FrejNorling 15y agoI can't open the site. First I cot a server error, now it loads forever. =) HN strikes again.
- timlossen 15y agoyeah, seems like my $10 VPS is a little overloaded right now .... will try to move the images off, that should help.
- kylecordes 15y agoFor things like this, I suggest S3+CloudFront. I don't know how well it compares to other CDNs in terms of cost-at-scale and performance-worldwide, but it is very good and can be set up without a sales process.
- jgoewert 15y agoSo, I'm guessing from the specs on the page the hardware is: SheevaPlug - http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-kit-us.aspx http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-k... Then some sort of 1 to 5 eSATA / SATA multiplier like this - http://www.amazon.com/5-Port-Port-SATA-II-Multiplier-SiI4726/dp/B004G7QVQU http://www.amazon.com/5-Port-Port-SATA-II-Multiplier-SiI4726... . I didn't know these even existed until I was trying to figure out how you attached the 5 drives to 1 eSATA port. I'm guessing this is powered by running a connection over from the Sheevaplug 120 MM Fan Then all of the metalwork and clips. I like the design on that. This definitely something I am going to build to decommission the ATOM nettop I am currently using to share a stack of external drives.
- timlossen 15y agoyeah, that's mostly right. the 5-port SATA backplane is a CFI-B53PM (from taiwan), using the same port multiplier chip (SiI3726). the fan is 140mm. i'll published a detailed parts list (including suppliers) this evening.
- richcollins 15y agoYeah, there are quite a few — but do they really look good next to your MacBook Pro? The drobo does. This looks like a machine shop class project.
- softbuilder 15y ago>This looks like a machine shop class project. That was my immediate thought upon seeing it. Those vent holes on the front in particular. It's a simple design and seems close to looking good, but it's missing the machining know-how. It would look like a dumpster next to a MacBook Pro.
- roqetman 15y agoI just setup my Tonidoplug yesterday (based on the same basic technology from what I understand). Primarily as a backup server, but the sharing between pc, laptop and mobiles is definitely cool: http://www.tonidoplug.com/tonido_plug.html http://www.tonidoplug.com/tonido_plug.html
- dquigley 15y agoRegardless of whether this is the "best" solution for everyone, I'm excited to see people trying these ideas, open sourcing their designs and creating space for there to even be a discussion like this. Pardon the cheesy line, but it's a move from just reviewing hardware to being able to actually revise it if you don't like something the original designer decided to do.
- stephenatwork 15y agoThat's a pretty unique interior setup. I built my own living room server that has comparable power usage (uses ~20 W from the wall in practice) with more traditional computer parts. I'm so used to the x86/x86-64 options of Intel, AMD, and Via that I have never considered building my own system with something other than x86. With low power/heat/noise as importance factors, one's x86 options are very limited. I went with an Intel Atom for my own build, which resulted in very limited choices for motherboards as far as number of SATA ports, hardware RAID controllers (for redundancy), etc. I am very interested now to see what options I might have now to build my own ARM server.
- tricky 15y agonot to ruin the spirit of this post/project, but if you're looking into a low power, inexpensive home server why not consider an old laptop with a few USB drives? With an old laptop you get battery backup (UPS) for free. Bonus points if you find a super cheap one with a broken display. Disclaimer: I've been doing this for years and it rocks.
- DanBC 15y agoOften not as low power as these modern tiny machines. But yeah; fitting FreeNAS on an old PC is easier than on something like SheevaPlug.
- icefox 15y agoPart of the project is the fact that it looks _good_, something a A broken laptop with hd's hanging off of can never be (unless it is an art piece).
- samstave 15y agoCool but way too expensive.
- 100k 15y agoThis would be sweet for running CrashPlan on. Are there other SAN solutions that work with CrashPlan? I looked about 2 years ago and didn't find a good option (to me, good = I don't have to leave my computer on all the time).
- jamilb 15y agoanyone else notice this site has a Poor rating on Senderbase?
- fdkz 15y agoSome interesting links I found while searching for a low-power server/NAS for myself: 8.5W Core i3-based desktop computer http://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/6112/85w-core-i3-based-desktop-computer-(english).html http://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/6112/85w-core-i3-based-... (from wikipedia: core-i5 mac mini consumes 13W while idle, core2duo model uses 10W) building a 8x2TB NAS http://www.willudesign.com/BlackDwarfTop.html http://www.willudesign.com/BlackDwarfTop.html
- timlossen 15y agothe first link is an awesome read, thanks for sharing!