4 ms·

Just beware of too old hardware that may end up costing more than expected because of their power draw. A NAS usually stays up 24/7 and power saving and reliabi

Just beware of too old hardware that may end up costing more than expected because of their power draw. A NAS usually stays up 24/7 and power saving and reliability become important. I would also avoid anything with a fan, particularly if they expect it to be running constantly. A mini PC with enough internal space to host a long m.2 SATA adapter (0) can become a quite compact solution; many used low performance Celeron based systems considered obsolete for desktop stuff would be more than enough for that task. 0: https://www.ebay.com/itm/256268302567 https://www.ebay.com/itm/256268302567 (no relation with the seller, just found searching "6xsata m.2" and removing those with lower feedback ratings). There are also 5xsata similar cards.

kjkjadksj 2y ago
When people talk about using these cards with the minipc how do they imagine setting these up? shuck the minipc out of its original case and zip tie it (no clue if its standard mobo probably not) to some case that can hold these drives and a psu? hack a hole out of the minipc and run the cabling to some cage of drives, powered by a separate psu?
- squarefoot 2y ago
  The boards sizes aren't standard, however drilling holes to fix them into a bigger case isn't that hard, same for power supplies. As for the disks, there are backplanes with SATA connectors that can host for example 5x3.5" drives into a 3x5.25" bay (0), so that the NAS can be pretty solid. Unfortunately they aren't cheap but the overall cost would be still lower than buying a new NAS with comparable features and performance. 0: https://www.reichelt.de/de/en/mobile-rack-3x-5-25-for-5x-3-5-sas-sata-icy-ib-565ssk-p303835.html https://www.reichelt.de/de/en/mobile-rack-3x-5-25-for-5x-3-5...
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    You think you even need sata for a nas, or would an external bay with usbc be enough for spinning rust?
    - squarefoot 2y ago
      USBc works perfectly wrt speed, but in my case I learned the hard way that there are some caveats. My current NAS is a mini PC connected to a external 8-bay USB3 enclosure with disks arranged as 4 ZFS mirror pools. It worked like charm with XigmaNAS (FreeBSD based) until the day I needed to add some files and the best solution was of course to connect another external USB disk to go faster than network transfer. As I connected the drive, suddenly all disks in the pools were shifted, with the external disk becoming part of the 1st pool, and all others mixed, with potentially devastating consequences. Of course I panicked and after a series of wrong moves destroyed the 1st pool which luckily I already had a very recent backup of. On BSD forums they explained that the embedded XigmaNAS edition does not make use of UUIDs so it's dependent on the order disks are being detected, which frankly shocked me: I wouldn't expect that from FreeBSD. Now, the detection order in case of the disk enclosure is always the same, but should I connect some other external drive, the disk order would go bonkers again, therefore I also feared what could happen if a disk suddenly becomes undetectable. However, it's only the web interface that goes out of sync wrt disk detection, and I later learned it can be fixed with the synchronize command. They say the full install is immune from that, and I plan to migrate everything, but I'd like to be sure I can do that transparently before embarking in that task.
skykooler 2y ago
It seems odd to me that there's no ARM-based NAS with SSDs on the market, to focus on minimum power consumption rather than maximum read/write speeds.
- squarefoot 2y ago
  The Kobol Helios64 was one, but they stopped development a few years ago. It is fully Open Source, and I still hope someone could take on the work because it could become a really interesting product. https://kobol.io/ https://kobol.io/
  - youngtaff 2y ago
    From memory it had a built in backup battery too
    - squarefoot 2y ago
      Yes, quite innovative and useful especially against outages during resyncs, although I'm not sure I'd want lithium cells inside a NAS.
- PietKachelhout 2y ago
  There is the CM3588 board [0] from FriendlyElec. LinusTechTips made a video about it. I just can't find a nice case for it. I've asked MyElectronics about it and they said they would consider making a case if they get enough requests. [0] https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=294 https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product... [1] https://myelectronics.nl/ https://myelectronics.nl/

kjkjadksj 2y ago

When people talk about using these cards with the minipc how do they imagine setting these up? shuck the minipc out of its original case and zip tie it (no clue if its standard mobo probably not) to some case that can hold these drives and a psu? hack a hole out of the minipc and run the cabling to some cage of drives, powered by a separate psu?

squarefoot 2y ago
The boards sizes aren't standard, however drilling holes to fix them into a bigger case isn't that hard, same for power supplies. As for the disks, there are backplanes with SATA connectors that can host for example 5x3.5" drives into a 3x5.25" bay (0), so that the NAS can be pretty solid. Unfortunately they aren't cheap but the overall cost would be still lower than buying a new NAS with comparable features and performance. 0: https://www.reichelt.de/de/en/mobile-rack-3x-5-25-for-5x-3-5-sas-sata-icy-ib-565ssk-p303835.html https://www.reichelt.de/de/en/mobile-rack-3x-5-25-for-5x-3-5...
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  You think you even need sata for a nas, or would an external bay with usbc be enough for spinning rust?
  - squarefoot 2y ago
    USBc works perfectly wrt speed, but in my case I learned the hard way that there are some caveats. My current NAS is a mini PC connected to a external 8-bay USB3 enclosure with disks arranged as 4 ZFS mirror pools. It worked like charm with XigmaNAS (FreeBSD based) until the day I needed to add some files and the best solution was of course to connect another external USB disk to go faster than network transfer. As I connected the drive, suddenly all disks in the pools were shifted, with the external disk becoming part of the 1st pool, and all others mixed, with potentially devastating consequences. Of course I panicked and after a series of wrong moves destroyed the 1st pool which luckily I already had a very recent backup of. On BSD forums they explained that the embedded XigmaNAS edition does not make use of UUIDs so it's dependent on the order disks are being detected, which frankly shocked me: I wouldn't expect that from FreeBSD. Now, the detection order in case of the disk enclosure is always the same, but should I connect some other external drive, the disk order would go bonkers again, therefore I also feared what could happen if a disk suddenly becomes undetectable. However, it's only the web interface that goes out of sync wrt disk detection, and I later learned it can be fixed with the synchronize command. They say the full install is immune from that, and I plan to migrate everything, but I'd like to be sure I can do that transparently before embarking in that task.

skykooler 2y ago

It seems odd to me that there's no ARM-based NAS with SSDs on the market, to focus on minimum power consumption rather than maximum read/write speeds.

squarefoot 2y ago
The Kobol Helios64 was one, but they stopped development a few years ago. It is fully Open Source, and I still hope someone could take on the work because it could become a really interesting product. https://kobol.io/ https://kobol.io/
- youngtaff 2y ago
  From memory it had a built in backup battery too
  - squarefoot 2y ago
    Yes, quite innovative and useful especially against outages during resyncs, although I'm not sure I'd want lithium cells inside a NAS.
PietKachelhout 2y ago
There is the CM3588 board [0] from FriendlyElec. LinusTechTips made a video about it. I just can't find a nice case for it. I've asked MyElectronics about it and they said they would consider making a case if they get enough requests. [0] https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=294 https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product... [1] https://myelectronics.nl/ https://myelectronics.nl/