12 ms·

I made a new backplane for my consumer NAS

411 points by granra 2y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> This USB header is only USB 2.0 though so it’s not an option for this purpose. Why not? I would not expect the OS drive to be I/O heavy on a NAS.
- granra 2y ago
  I also use the NAS for some light server workloads and it was just annoyingly slow when running on a USB 2.0 thumb drive. System updates took forever too. Edit: I want to add though that the main reason behind this is "for fun" :D
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > I also use the NAS for some light server workloads and it was just annoyingly slow when running on a USB 2.0 thumb drive. System updates took forever too. Ah, fair enough - I suppose NAS/server is a bit of a continuum anyways. > I want to add though that the main reason behind this is "for fun" :D Yeah, that seemed more likely up front:D
  - mfsch 2y ago
    You could still move e.g. /nix to the BTRFS disks and only keep /boot on the thumb drive, no? That’s more or less how I have NixOS set up with ZFS. But your solution is of course much fancier :D
    - kylemart 2y ago
      Could you share more about your NixOS setup, or good resources? Genuinely curious as I’m looking into building a small, low-budget Plex server running NixOS :)
    - granra 2y ago
      That would be too loud imo :p I started using hd-idle to spin down the drives when idle for 30 minutes even. I do however run my system with root on tmpfs and have various data persisted on the SSD.
- LoganDark 2y ago
  Not in an absolute sense, but the speed limitations of USB 2.0 do become immediately apparent when you try to run an operating system off of it. Even a super lightweight Linux is usually going to load binaries from disk when executed, and logs are going to be written to disk, etc. Also page faults are going to be slooooow.
  - ComputerGuru 2y ago
    > and logs are going to be written to disk [...] Also page faults are going to be slooooow. OP did say they added a stick of RAM, so w/ ZRAM on there it might not be too bad. Raspberry Pi forced an entire generation of software hacks to deal with slow os/boot disk speeds (esp. the earlier models but also just the affordability aspect even with the new models).
    - LoganDark 2y ago
      For small OS images you can sometimes get away with loading the whole thing into RAM on boot and then running from RAM, which essentially removes the boot drive from the equation completely except for that initial copy to RAM. I always pick this option when I use Clonezilla because usually I'm booting it from a USB stick and everything would be slow the whole time if I didn't put it into RAM.
  - justsomehnguy 2y ago
    Ugh, not the speed itself (you can have up to 30MB/s, which is more than enough), but the ability to serve multiple requests simultaneously, ie Queue Depth. Most of the time you xan assume QD for them is 2 and you would't miss at all.
buescher 2y ago
Surprising and elegant. That's an amazingly long way to get by guesswork, a bit of trial and error, beeping out circuits, and surprisingly casual substitution of the load switch IC.
- granra 2y ago
  Thanks! There was an incredible amount of information I gathered from various forums and stack exchange that I had to sometimes just reluctantly view as facts :D But it worked out!
  - buescher 2y ago
    It’s really cool. I’m glad it worked. What you didn’t know probably kept you from analysis paralysis.
Teknomancer 2y ago
This isn't directly useful to me, but it thrills me nonetheless. It is so great to see people digging in like this, learning and sharing what they learn, and that inspires me! Great work!!!
- granra 2y ago
  Thank you!
pixelatedindex 2y ago
I love it when people spend the time and energy to reverse engineer a circuit board and figure out the pin outs without a manual. It’s not easy, so kudos!
- granra 2y ago
  Thank you! There's still a bit of the pins who's purpose are unknown to me but thankfully ended up not mattering for my purpose.
  - geerlingguy 2y ago
    "If it works, it ships!" :)
    - granra 2y ago
      This guy gets it! I like your videos btw! :)
crote 2y ago
Absolutely incredible job. If I hadn't seen the blog post, I would've believed that it came out-of-the-box like this.
- granra 2y ago
  Thanks!
dragontamer 2y ago
> This was my first time soldering DFN packages and they’re tiny! Because I don’t have a microscope or anything to visually inspect my soldering and these components were mostly just handling power anyway I just checked for shorts between power and ground and tried to take close-ups using my phone to see if I could spot any shorts. The technique that ended up working well for me to solder on these DFN packages without a stencil is to put what can only be described as way too much solder paste on the pads and then pushing the IC in the pool of solder, when the solder melts from the heat of my hot air station the IC will float on top and then I push down on it with tweezers and all excess solder will squeeze out and bead up, hopefully landing somewhere on the solder mask, where I can pick it up later once it’s solid. This is positively an insane methodology for soldering. Fun, but insane. I actually can imagine that it works, strangely enough. But I don't think you'd get much consistent reliability with this. More like it'd work often enough that its good for one-off projects.
- granra 2y ago
  It worked for me 8 times :) Thankfully the bottom pad on DFN packages reach the edge on 2 sides and I would think this technique wouldn't work with QFN.
  - dragontamer 2y ago
    QFN is (very, very slowly) opening up to the idea of "wettable flanks", which is increasing the reliability of QFN soldering anyway... which is increasing the opportunity of "side-soldering" QFN packages. https://www.ti.com/document-viewer/lit/html/SSZTBN6 https://www.ti.com/document-viewer/lit/html/SSZTBN6 Here's to hoping for more manual soldering techniques to work into the future! We all know that these parts are getting extremely small and harder to work with, but its still clearly possible to make devices. But yeah, QFNs, if this wettable-flank trend continues, could be quite reliably soldered and inspected from the sides soon. The needs of the high-reliability automotive industry to create an inspection methodology outside of X-Rays is driving this change. ------------ Glad to hear that your technique worked in any case. I wouldn't have tried that, but maybe I'll try it once next time I have a hot-air gun out and a DFN part to try it on. EDIT: Note that Microchip apparently has some DFNs that also have wettable-flanks: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/about/media-center/blog/2022/dfn-packages-with-wettable-flanks https://www.microchip.com/en-us/about/media-center/blog/2022...
gyf304 2y ago
This is an awesome solution. I have the 5-bay variant of the same NAS. I decided to put TrueNAS Scale on it using a Samsung USB stick using the internal USB. I chose one that’s widely used for Tesla dashcam, so I know it is at least somewhat durable. I’m happy with it so far. I still find the CPU performance very lacking so I’m planning on upgrading to something beefier.
- granra 2y ago
  Oh absolutely the CPU is lacking in performance. I actually entertained the idea of replacing the motherboard with a custom carrier for some arm compute module or the new Lattepanda mu but I suppose I should first use my new project that I spent so much work on :p
tombert 2y ago
This looks way cooler than the "custom" case I made out of Legos to house my homebrew NAS. I had four USB hard drives plugged into a hub and that hub was plugged into an Nvidia Jetson. I wanted to make it self-contained and knockoff Legos are so cheap that it was an easy experiment to run. Also fun. This looks a lot more professional and I'm kind of jealous.
wvh 2y ago
I always admire the depth and effort people are willing to get into, especially if the chance of messing up means losing actual money, like tweaking guitars or hardware. I assume you have to gain some experience with soldering irons or woodworking tools elsewhere before taking the proverbial axe to a project like this. I wonder why there isn't much of a market of more hackable small form factor boxes where it's easier to tinker with the hardware or software. I'd love a consumer (price) level NAS where the OS can be ripped out and replaced with some vanilla OS/kernel. Or maybe I'm just too chicken with modifying actual physical objects.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  > I'd love a consumer (price) level NAS where the OS can be ripped out and replaced with some vanilla OS/kernel. Are there any good options today? I keep thinking of picking up a NAS, but I really do not want to use a proprietary vendor OS that might feel entitled to scan my data for useless/hostile cloud integrations. Or might have left some hardcoded password backdoors.
  - lloydatkinson 2y ago
    From the same site https://codedbearder.com/posts/nixos-terramaster-f2-221/ https://codedbearder.com/posts/nixos-terramaster-f2-221/
  - InTheArena 2y ago
    Ugreen NAS - currently on kickstarter for this summer - but it's a reputable company. https://nas.ugreen.com/pages/ugreen-nas-storage-preheat https://nas.ugreen.com/pages/ugreen-nas-storage-preheat Their hardware is dramatically better at the price points then the alternatives - even if they do have some comprimises.
    - tremon 2y ago
      Wow, those hardware specs are nice. What compromises do you refer to, specifically? I think that the 8GB ram and 128GB flash cache are on the small side, but both are user-replaceable so not that big a deal. The only thing I really miss here is ECC ram, but that's entirely due to Intel's market segmentation and not something they can change, save by completely changing their platform vendor.
ThomW 2y ago
I would have bought some velcro strips with adhesive and stuck it to the side of the box. lol
- granra 2y ago
  Haha! I guess the honest reason is that I love digging way too deep and over engineering my projects :D
shadowpho 2y ago
Installing OS into a usb2 drive would’ve been plenty fast, it’s like 60 MB/s but you still get fast random I/O.
- granra 2y ago
  Not mentioned in the post but I also run some light server workloads on this machine and things were annoyingly slow with a USB 2.0 thumb drive. I'm not gonna pretend that the real reason for making this wasn't because I have fun tinkering though.
- redundantly 2y ago
  60MB/s (480Mbps) is a marketing number. The actual maximum is 43MB/s. The real world speeds are 30-40MB/s if you're doing either writes or reads only. USB 2.0 is half duplex, so if you're reading and writing simultaneously it will be half, or worse, of the real world maximum, which is what will happen if you're using it as the OS disk. The random I/O isn't that great either. The max you'll be able to get is ~200 IOPs for sequential reads/writes. Even flash storage takes a bit of a hit when doing random I/O vs sequential. Also, flash storage is often slower at writing than reading, that degrades performance even further. USB 2.0 will work okay for many NAS boot disk scenarios, but it will be an absolute slog when performing reboots, configuration changes, accessing logs, performing updates, installing new packages, so on and so forth. If you can avoid it, don't use USB 2.0 for your boot device :)
  - shadowpho 2y ago
    Interesting, I did usb2 for a while on a pi3(?) and it worked decently well. Why is iops only 200?
    - redundantly 2y ago
      It'll work, but for things like FreeNAS/TruNAS/OMV where there's a decent amount of logging occurring and standard activities need to be done (configuration changes, updates, etc) the poor performance rears its ugly head. As for the rPi3, you won't notice the difference, usually, between an external USB flash drive and the built-in MicroSD slot because they both go over the same USB controller. When you do notice differences it'll have to do with the quality and speed of the particular microsd cards and usb flash devices you use. The limitation of IOPs has to do with how the communication works and the limits to frame sizes and amount of frames that can be transmitted at the same time. The bus fills up quickly when lots of traffic is occurring. The USB 2.0 spec was released over twenty years ago. At that time the performance was incredible, but only in comparison to USB 1.x. If all you have available to you is USB 2.0 for your OS/boot storage, then by all means use it, however if you don't need to, if you can avoid it, don't use it. Leave those ports open for your keyboard and mouse. ;)
IncreasePosts 2y ago
I'm such a bad hacker. I had the same issue with having an external drive plugged into my NAS. What did I do? I just used velcro to attach it to the top of the NAS.
- granra 2y ago
  Maybe you value your free time more than me :)
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Just the opposite I would say.
- justinclift 2y ago
  Similar here, but hot glue is my go-to for stuff like this. :)
- s0rce 2y ago
  Mine just sits beside it.
neilv 2y ago
> This USB header is only USB 2.0 though so it's not an option for this purpose. Not questioning a great project, but just curiosity about this small aside: why is USB 2.0 not suitable for the OS? On a NAS, is it doing anything other than boot-time reading, and maybe occasionally writing a little data?
- kylemart 2y ago
  +1, I was wondering the same thing. Genuinely curious.
- zootboy 2y ago
  I run a NAS on a USB 2.0 boot disk, and the only issue I have with it is that systemd-journald really isn't built with slow disks in mind. Doing a journalctl operation with 6 months of log files takes a good minute or two because of journalctl's non-optimal file access patterns.
- granra 2y ago
  Not mentioned in the post but I also run some light server workloads on this machine and things were annoyingly slow with a USB 2.0 thumb drive. I'm not gonna pretend that the real reason for making this wasn't because I have fun tinkering though.
  - neilv 2y ago
    It's a great project, and your solution is also technically superior to running off USB 2.0 thumb drives.
funnym0nk3y 2y ago
It seems like his version is missing lots of parts in comparison to the original one. They probably aren't there being useless. The engineer who designed the original backplane must have thought something. So, what's missing?
- granra 2y ago
  It was mentioned in the post but from what I could gather from the schematic I drew up of the existing circuit it's load switches for each power rail with slow starters, made with only discrete components. Instead of recreating all that I looked for an integrated chip with all that functionality built-in and went with NCP45521-L. That's why mine has such a low number of components.
whartung 2y ago
I don't really need a NAS. My Mac is always on anyway. I did try to put ZFS on it, just on a single USB drive, and when copying files to it, my system became unresponsive. Mouse, keyboard, dr aa gg ge d. I/O drops down to about a 1/5th to 1/4 of what it should be. Just crushes my machine (last generation Intel iMac). Top/Activity monitor doesn't show anything truly untoward. Spikes of 400% CPU (supposed to be an 8 core machine). Just trying to prevent bit rot, but not in the cards for this machine for some reason.
- taskforcegemini 2y ago
  a single zfs drive will not be enough to resolve bit rot
geerlingguy 2y ago
I would love to see more standardization for consumer NAS builds. I've been asking ASUSTOR in particular for a few years now if they'd consider building a Mini ITX-compatible backplane/adapter, so you could swap out the backplane after a few years if you want. Or even Pico ITX or something, so you could swap in an SBC. I hate that after 5 or 10 years, NASes can't really be upgraded. A lot of 1 Gbps NASes could be upgraded to 2.5 Gbps or even 10 Gbps if you could swap out the motherboard, keeping the chassis out of the landfill or extending its useful life.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- sockbot 2y ago
  I'd love to see Framework get into this space. It is such a HUGE waste to retire my NAS chassis and backplane when the compute portion gets too old. There could be some good synergies with the Laptop 13 mainboard, having a laptop-level TDP and with ARM possibly coming around the corner. Where I feel the risk is the market for NAS appliances doesn't feel very big ("prosumer" and mom and pop businesses?) and the differentiator really is in the software, not the hardware. i.e. People buy Synology for DSM, not the hardware. I think I read somewhere that Framework doesn't have any plans to get into vertical integration, which saddens me. I'd love to have a Framework backed OS and have things working perfectly out of the box like sleep and touchpad feel.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- zamadatix 2y ago
  In that front I wish their FLASHSTOR product was a 6/12 bay NVMe add in card rather than an integrated motherboard+pcie switch+soldered CPU+soldered RAM. I'd love to just pop that kind of thing into a normal PC but all the ones I've found are either 4 porters or extremely expensive.
- wil421 2y ago
  Buy a Supermicro board, build your own back plane or use an off the shelf one, and add as many expansion cards as your heart desires (and mobo can handle).
FounderBurr 2y ago
A project that isn’t someone hot gluing arduinos to everything?! Nice work!
- granra 2y ago
  Oh that annoyed me so much back when I was getting into Arduino and had an uno. Just take the atmega 328p out and solder it to a perfboard! Thanks!
somat 2y ago
Well done, I love these sort of projects where people take control over their hardware. An extra salute for publicly documenting it. I wonder if it will cause airflow issues? The original(and updated) pcb has a large hole in the center, I presume for airflow across the drives. which the nvme drive obscures. My guess is there will be enough leakage around the edge of the nvme to provide enough cooling to the normal drives and you get the worlds best cooled nvme drive for free. However, it does look very tight.
- granra 2y ago
  This was also a concern of mine. Not knowing too much about aerodynamics I can't be certain but I think some airflow should be going through the hole. You may also have noticed that the screw standoff for the SSD is pushed as far out to the left of the PCB to allow for more air to pass on the right side. But I have at least not noticed any negative cooling performance :) Thanks for your comment!
riobard 2y ago
Does anyone know what's going on with those U.2 NVMe hard disk drives? (see https://blog.seagate.com/enterprises/seagate-unveils-worlds-first-native-nvme-hdd-demo-at-ocp/ https://blog.seagate.com/enterprises/seagate-unveils-worlds-...) I'm asking coz the OP mentioned the need for a PCIe-to-SATA bridge chip to have more than a couple of SATA ports. I'd assume that if HDD were also NVMe devices, it will be simpler to just wire each PCIe lane to a drive, without requiring any bridges. A PCIe 2.0 x1 lane is 500MB/s, on par with SATA III 6Gbps.
- top_sigrid 2y ago
  These are formfactors that come from the datacenter industry and probably will become very widespread over the next years. The ServeTheHome Youtube channel had a good overview video about those drives around 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Nh3p6779E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Nh3p6779E
  - riobard 2y ago
    Thanks but the STH video you linked is talking about new "ruler" form factors for SSDs and accelerator cards. I was wondering if anyone actually used the 3.5" HDD with U.2/NVMe connector.
  - justsomehnguy 2y ago
    > probably will become very widespread over the next years Doubt. SATA and SAS is more than enough, cheap (not for the customer) and has 20+ years of experience. What we would see is a clear distinction between 3.5 HDD and whatver SSD storage boxes. Consumers? 2.5 and M.2 for SSD, 3.5 for HDD. For years.
roosgit 2y ago
This is awesome work! But for someone who doesn’t have the necessary skills to pull something like this off, a Samsung Fit Plus USB flash drive might work too. I have one in my old MacBook Air and pretty much don’t notice it. The 128GB version is around $20.
running101 2y ago
You don't need a NAS. Just connect a direct attached storage to your PC/mac then share it out.

411 points by granra 2y ago

> This USB header is only USB 2.0 though so it’s not an option for this purpose. Why not? I would not expect the OS drive to be I/O heavy on a NAS.

granra 2y ago
I also use the NAS for some light server workloads and it was just annoyingly slow when running on a USB 2.0 thumb drive. System updates took forever too. Edit: I want to add though that the main reason behind this is "for fun" :D
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > I also use the NAS for some light server workloads and it was just annoyingly slow when running on a USB 2.0 thumb drive. System updates took forever too. Ah, fair enough - I suppose NAS/server is a bit of a continuum anyways. > I want to add though that the main reason behind this is "for fun" :D Yeah, that seemed more likely up front:D
- mfsch 2y ago
  You could still move e.g. /nix to the BTRFS disks and only keep /boot on the thumb drive, no? That’s more or less how I have NixOS set up with ZFS. But your solution is of course much fancier :D
  - kylemart 2y ago
    Could you share more about your NixOS setup, or good resources? Genuinely curious as I’m looking into building a small, low-budget Plex server running NixOS :)
  - granra 2y ago
    That would be too loud imo :p I started using hd-idle to spin down the drives when idle for 30 minutes even. I do however run my system with root on tmpfs and have various data persisted on the SSD.
LoganDark 2y ago
Not in an absolute sense, but the speed limitations of USB 2.0 do become immediately apparent when you try to run an operating system off of it. Even a super lightweight Linux is usually going to load binaries from disk when executed, and logs are going to be written to disk, etc. Also page faults are going to be slooooow.
- ComputerGuru 2y ago
  > and logs are going to be written to disk [...] Also page faults are going to be slooooow. OP did say they added a stick of RAM, so w/ ZRAM on there it might not be too bad. Raspberry Pi forced an entire generation of software hacks to deal with slow os/boot disk speeds (esp. the earlier models but also just the affordability aspect even with the new models).
  - LoganDark 2y ago
    For small OS images you can sometimes get away with loading the whole thing into RAM on boot and then running from RAM, which essentially removes the boot drive from the equation completely except for that initial copy to RAM. I always pick this option when I use Clonezilla because usually I'm booting it from a USB stick and everything would be slow the whole time if I didn't put it into RAM.
- justsomehnguy 2y ago
  Ugh, not the speed itself (you can have up to 30MB/s, which is more than enough), but the ability to serve multiple requests simultaneously, ie Queue Depth. Most of the time you xan assume QD for them is 2 and you would't miss at all.

buescher 2y ago

Surprising and elegant. That's an amazingly long way to get by guesswork, a bit of trial and error, beeping out circuits, and surprisingly casual substitution of the load switch IC.

granra 2y ago
Thanks! There was an incredible amount of information I gathered from various forums and stack exchange that I had to sometimes just reluctantly view as facts :D But it worked out!
- buescher 2y ago
  It’s really cool. I’m glad it worked. What you didn’t know probably kept you from analysis paralysis.

Teknomancer 2y ago

This isn't directly useful to me, but it thrills me nonetheless. It is so great to see people digging in like this, learning and sharing what they learn, and that inspires me! Great work!!!

granra 2y ago
Thank you!

pixelatedindex 2y ago

I love it when people spend the time and energy to reverse engineer a circuit board and figure out the pin outs without a manual. It’s not easy, so kudos!

granra 2y ago
Thank you! There's still a bit of the pins who's purpose are unknown to me but thankfully ended up not mattering for my purpose.
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  "If it works, it ships!" :)
  - granra 2y ago
    This guy gets it! I like your videos btw! :)

crote 2y ago

Absolutely incredible job. If I hadn't seen the blog post, I would've believed that it came out-of-the-box like this.

granra 2y ago
Thanks!

dragontamer 2y ago

> This was my first time soldering DFN packages and they’re tiny! Because I don’t have a microscope or anything to visually inspect my soldering and these components were mostly just handling power anyway I just checked for shorts between power and ground and tried to take close-ups using my phone to see if I could spot any shorts. The technique that ended up working well for me to solder on these DFN packages without a stencil is to put what can only be described as way too much solder paste on the pads and then pushing the IC in the pool of solder, when the solder melts from the heat of my hot air station the IC will float on top and then I push down on it with tweezers and all excess solder will squeeze out and bead up, hopefully landing somewhere on the solder mask, where I can pick it up later once it’s solid. This is positively an insane methodology for soldering. Fun, but insane. I actually can imagine that it works, strangely enough. But I don't think you'd get much consistent reliability with this. More like it'd work often enough that its good for one-off projects.

granra 2y ago
It worked for me 8 times :) Thankfully the bottom pad on DFN packages reach the edge on 2 sides and I would think this technique wouldn't work with QFN.
- dragontamer 2y ago
  QFN is (very, very slowly) opening up to the idea of "wettable flanks", which is increasing the reliability of QFN soldering anyway... which is increasing the opportunity of "side-soldering" QFN packages. https://www.ti.com/document-viewer/lit/html/SSZTBN6 https://www.ti.com/document-viewer/lit/html/SSZTBN6 Here's to hoping for more manual soldering techniques to work into the future! We all know that these parts are getting extremely small and harder to work with, but its still clearly possible to make devices. But yeah, QFNs, if this wettable-flank trend continues, could be quite reliably soldered and inspected from the sides soon. The needs of the high-reliability automotive industry to create an inspection methodology outside of X-Rays is driving this change. ------------ Glad to hear that your technique worked in any case. I wouldn't have tried that, but maybe I'll try it once next time I have a hot-air gun out and a DFN part to try it on. EDIT: Note that Microchip apparently has some DFNs that also have wettable-flanks: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/about/media-center/blog/2022/dfn-packages-with-wettable-flanks https://www.microchip.com/en-us/about/media-center/blog/2022...

gyf304 2y ago

This is an awesome solution. I have the 5-bay variant of the same NAS. I decided to put TrueNAS Scale on it using a Samsung USB stick using the internal USB. I chose one that’s widely used for Tesla dashcam, so I know it is at least somewhat durable. I’m happy with it so far. I still find the CPU performance very lacking so I’m planning on upgrading to something beefier.

granra 2y ago
Oh absolutely the CPU is lacking in performance. I actually entertained the idea of replacing the motherboard with a custom carrier for some arm compute module or the new Lattepanda mu but I suppose I should first use my new project that I spent so much work on :p

tombert 2y ago

This looks way cooler than the "custom" case I made out of Legos to house my homebrew NAS. I had four USB hard drives plugged into a hub and that hub was plugged into an Nvidia Jetson. I wanted to make it self-contained and knockoff Legos are so cheap that it was an easy experiment to run. Also fun. This looks a lot more professional and I'm kind of jealous.

wvh 2y ago

I always admire the depth and effort people are willing to get into, especially if the chance of messing up means losing actual money, like tweaking guitars or hardware. I assume you have to gain some experience with soldering irons or woodworking tools elsewhere before taking the proverbial axe to a project like this. I wonder why there isn't much of a market of more hackable small form factor boxes where it's easier to tinker with the hardware or software. I'd love a consumer (price) level NAS where the OS can be ripped out and replaced with some vanilla OS/kernel. Or maybe I'm just too chicken with modifying actual physical objects.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
> I'd love a consumer (price) level NAS where the OS can be ripped out and replaced with some vanilla OS/kernel. Are there any good options today? I keep thinking of picking up a NAS, but I really do not want to use a proprietary vendor OS that might feel entitled to scan my data for useless/hostile cloud integrations. Or might have left some hardcoded password backdoors.
- lloydatkinson 2y ago
  From the same site https://codedbearder.com/posts/nixos-terramaster-f2-221/ https://codedbearder.com/posts/nixos-terramaster-f2-221/
- InTheArena 2y ago
  Ugreen NAS - currently on kickstarter for this summer - but it's a reputable company. https://nas.ugreen.com/pages/ugreen-nas-storage-preheat https://nas.ugreen.com/pages/ugreen-nas-storage-preheat Their hardware is dramatically better at the price points then the alternatives - even if they do have some comprimises.
  - tremon 2y ago
    Wow, those hardware specs are nice. What compromises do you refer to, specifically? I think that the 8GB ram and 128GB flash cache are on the small side, but both are user-replaceable so not that big a deal. The only thing I really miss here is ECC ram, but that's entirely due to Intel's market segmentation and not something they can change, save by completely changing their platform vendor.

ThomW 2y ago

I would have bought some velcro strips with adhesive and stuck it to the side of the box. lol

granra 2y ago
Haha! I guess the honest reason is that I love digging way too deep and over engineering my projects :D

shadowpho 2y ago

Installing OS into a usb2 drive would’ve been plenty fast, it’s like 60 MB/s but you still get fast random I/O.

granra 2y ago
Not mentioned in the post but I also run some light server workloads on this machine and things were annoyingly slow with a USB 2.0 thumb drive. I'm not gonna pretend that the real reason for making this wasn't because I have fun tinkering though.
redundantly 2y ago
60MB/s (480Mbps) is a marketing number. The actual maximum is 43MB/s. The real world speeds are 30-40MB/s if you're doing either writes or reads only. USB 2.0 is half duplex, so if you're reading and writing simultaneously it will be half, or worse, of the real world maximum, which is what will happen if you're using it as the OS disk. The random I/O isn't that great either. The max you'll be able to get is ~200 IOPs for sequential reads/writes. Even flash storage takes a bit of a hit when doing random I/O vs sequential. Also, flash storage is often slower at writing than reading, that degrades performance even further. USB 2.0 will work okay for many NAS boot disk scenarios, but it will be an absolute slog when performing reboots, configuration changes, accessing logs, performing updates, installing new packages, so on and so forth. If you can avoid it, don't use USB 2.0 for your boot device :)
- shadowpho 2y ago
  Interesting, I did usb2 for a while on a pi3(?) and it worked decently well. Why is iops only 200?
  - redundantly 2y ago
    It'll work, but for things like FreeNAS/TruNAS/OMV where there's a decent amount of logging occurring and standard activities need to be done (configuration changes, updates, etc) the poor performance rears its ugly head. As for the rPi3, you won't notice the difference, usually, between an external USB flash drive and the built-in MicroSD slot because they both go over the same USB controller. When you do notice differences it'll have to do with the quality and speed of the particular microsd cards and usb flash devices you use. The limitation of IOPs has to do with how the communication works and the limits to frame sizes and amount of frames that can be transmitted at the same time. The bus fills up quickly when lots of traffic is occurring. The USB 2.0 spec was released over twenty years ago. At that time the performance was incredible, but only in comparison to USB 1.x. If all you have available to you is USB 2.0 for your OS/boot storage, then by all means use it, however if you don't need to, if you can avoid it, don't use it. Leave those ports open for your keyboard and mouse. ;)

IncreasePosts 2y ago

I'm such a bad hacker. I had the same issue with having an external drive plugged into my NAS. What did I do? I just used velcro to attach it to the top of the NAS.

granra 2y ago
Maybe you value your free time more than me :)
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Just the opposite I would say.
justinclift 2y ago
Similar here, but hot glue is my go-to for stuff like this. :)
s0rce 2y ago
Mine just sits beside it.

neilv 2y ago

> This USB header is only USB 2.0 though so it's not an option for this purpose. Not questioning a great project, but just curiosity about this small aside: why is USB 2.0 not suitable for the OS? On a NAS, is it doing anything other than boot-time reading, and maybe occasionally writing a little data?

kylemart 2y ago
+1, I was wondering the same thing. Genuinely curious.
zootboy 2y ago
I run a NAS on a USB 2.0 boot disk, and the only issue I have with it is that systemd-journald really isn't built with slow disks in mind. Doing a journalctl operation with 6 months of log files takes a good minute or two because of journalctl's non-optimal file access patterns.
granra 2y ago
Not mentioned in the post but I also run some light server workloads on this machine and things were annoyingly slow with a USB 2.0 thumb drive. I'm not gonna pretend that the real reason for making this wasn't because I have fun tinkering though.
- neilv 2y ago
  It's a great project, and your solution is also technically superior to running off USB 2.0 thumb drives.

funnym0nk3y 2y ago

It seems like his version is missing lots of parts in comparison to the original one. They probably aren't there being useless. The engineer who designed the original backplane must have thought something. So, what's missing?

granra 2y ago
It was mentioned in the post but from what I could gather from the schematic I drew up of the existing circuit it's load switches for each power rail with slow starters, made with only discrete components. Instead of recreating all that I looked for an integrated chip with all that functionality built-in and went with NCP45521-L. That's why mine has such a low number of components.

whartung 2y ago

I don't really need a NAS. My Mac is always on anyway. I did try to put ZFS on it, just on a single USB drive, and when copying files to it, my system became unresponsive. Mouse, keyboard, dr aa gg ge d. I/O drops down to about a 1/5th to 1/4 of what it should be. Just crushes my machine (last generation Intel iMac). Top/Activity monitor doesn't show anything truly untoward. Spikes of 400% CPU (supposed to be an 8 core machine). Just trying to prevent bit rot, but not in the cards for this machine for some reason.

taskforcegemini 2y ago
a single zfs drive will not be enough to resolve bit rot

geerlingguy 2y ago

I would love to see more standardization for consumer NAS builds. I've been asking ASUSTOR in particular for a few years now if they'd consider building a Mini ITX-compatible backplane/adapter, so you could swap out the backplane after a few years if you want. Or even Pico ITX or something, so you could swap in an SBC. I hate that after 5 or 10 years, NASes can't really be upgraded. A lot of 1 Gbps NASes could be upgraded to 2.5 Gbps or even 10 Gbps if you could swap out the motherboard, keeping the chassis out of the landfill or extending its useful life.

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sockbot 2y ago
I'd love to see Framework get into this space. It is such a HUGE waste to retire my NAS chassis and backplane when the compute portion gets too old. There could be some good synergies with the Laptop 13 mainboard, having a laptop-level TDP and with ARM possibly coming around the corner. Where I feel the risk is the market for NAS appliances doesn't feel very big ("prosumer" and mom and pop businesses?) and the differentiator really is in the software, not the hardware. i.e. People buy Synology for DSM, not the hardware. I think I read somewhere that Framework doesn't have any plans to get into vertical integration, which saddens me. I'd love to have a Framework backed OS and have things working perfectly out of the box like sleep and touchpad feel.
- deleted 2y ago
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zamadatix 2y ago
In that front I wish their FLASHSTOR product was a 6/12 bay NVMe add in card rather than an integrated motherboard+pcie switch+soldered CPU+soldered RAM. I'd love to just pop that kind of thing into a normal PC but all the ones I've found are either 4 porters or extremely expensive.
wil421 2y ago
Buy a Supermicro board, build your own back plane or use an off the shelf one, and add as many expansion cards as your heart desires (and mobo can handle).

FounderBurr 2y ago

A project that isn’t someone hot gluing arduinos to everything?! Nice work!

granra 2y ago
Oh that annoyed me so much back when I was getting into Arduino and had an uno. Just take the atmega 328p out and solder it to a perfboard! Thanks!

somat 2y ago

Well done, I love these sort of projects where people take control over their hardware. An extra salute for publicly documenting it. I wonder if it will cause airflow issues? The original(and updated) pcb has a large hole in the center, I presume for airflow across the drives. which the nvme drive obscures. My guess is there will be enough leakage around the edge of the nvme to provide enough cooling to the normal drives and you get the worlds best cooled nvme drive for free. However, it does look very tight.

granra 2y ago
This was also a concern of mine. Not knowing too much about aerodynamics I can't be certain but I think some airflow should be going through the hole. You may also have noticed that the screw standoff for the SSD is pushed as far out to the left of the PCB to allow for more air to pass on the right side. But I have at least not noticed any negative cooling performance :) Thanks for your comment!

riobard 2y ago

Does anyone know what's going on with those U.2 NVMe hard disk drives? (see https://blog.seagate.com/enterprises/seagate-unveils-worlds-first-native-nvme-hdd-demo-at-ocp/ https://blog.seagate.com/enterprises/seagate-unveils-worlds-...) I'm asking coz the OP mentioned the need for a PCIe-to-SATA bridge chip to have more than a couple of SATA ports. I'd assume that if HDD were also NVMe devices, it will be simpler to just wire each PCIe lane to a drive, without requiring any bridges. A PCIe 2.0 x1 lane is 500MB/s, on par with SATA III 6Gbps.

top_sigrid 2y ago
These are formfactors that come from the datacenter industry and probably will become very widespread over the next years. The ServeTheHome Youtube channel had a good overview video about those drives around 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Nh3p6779E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Nh3p6779E
- riobard 2y ago
  Thanks but the STH video you linked is talking about new "ruler" form factors for SSDs and accelerator cards. I was wondering if anyone actually used the 3.5" HDD with U.2/NVMe connector.
- justsomehnguy 2y ago
  > probably will become very widespread over the next years Doubt. SATA and SAS is more than enough, cheap (not for the customer) and has 20+ years of experience. What we would see is a clear distinction between 3.5 HDD and whatver SSD storage boxes. Consumers? 2.5 and M.2 for SSD, 3.5 for HDD. For years.

roosgit 2y ago

This is awesome work! But for someone who doesn’t have the necessary skills to pull something like this off, a Samsung Fit Plus USB flash drive might work too. I have one in my old MacBook Air and pretty much don’t notice it. The 128GB version is around $20.

running101 2y ago

You don't need a NAS. Just connect a direct attached storage to your PC/mac then share it out.