[HN Gopher] Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee Carrier Board
        
       Author : tobijkl
       Score  : 103 points
       Date   : 2021-02-01 10:57 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.cnx-software.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.cnx-software.com)
        
       | Damogran6 wrote:
       | A quick google shows eMMC flash memory for the compute
       | module...do you need to mindfully control writing to flash to
       | keep something like this from nuking the boot device? Could be my
       | choice of storage (whatever $4 buys at Microcenter) but the
       | failure mode on my RPi weather station was SD card death. I'd
       | hate to rely on that for a NAS.
        
         | manuel_w wrote:
         | Since some firmware update released in September 2020 it's
         | possible to boot Raspberry Pi 4s from USB. It's a bit
         | cumbersome to piece the info together, but it's there:
         | https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
        
         | cure wrote:
         | You can also boot the pi 4 via kind-of-special-sauce PXE. I
         | wish they had just adopted standard PXE (why do we need a magic
         | string? What the hell is going on with the three spaces in that
         | magic string... Why can't we use the standard PXE way to
         | specify the file to load?), but it's better than nothing. See
         | https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
         | 
         | [edit: fixed spelling]
        
       | 1MachineElf wrote:
       | I would still defer to something with ECC RAM and ZFS for keeping
       | my data, but I could see myself using something like this for
       | unimportant data and/or serving important data as a read-only
       | mirror. Either way, I love that an RPi system will soon come in a
       | sweet form-factor optimized for NAS use.
        
       | gitowiec wrote:
       | Do not buy ROCK Pi SATA HAT. I own one, and after few months of
       | lite usage with 4 SSDs, one channel (two SSD connectors) has just
       | died. I just installed OpenMediaVault and configured LVM on 2TB,
       | 2x 1TB and .5 TB SSDs, to use it as a home media server.
       | 
       | I recently tried to initialize warranty process (I bought it
       | directly from shop.allnetchina.cn with shipping to Central
       | Europe) but I got no replay.
        
         | lnsru wrote:
         | What warranty process? You are in Central Europe. Seller is in
         | China, no distributor in between. Basically you have no rights,
         | buy it cheap and forget. Warranty lol. Best case for you is to
         | open a case with your credit card vendor or PayPal. But you got
         | what you paid for. As I maker in Europe I don't feel bad about
         | you, because I must sell everything for insane price with
         | included 2 years warranty. While Chinese not.
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | geerlingguy wrote:
       | There are a few people currently working on NAS boards based on
       | the CM4. A few different approaches in terms of chipsets used and
       | performance targets.
       | 
       | I'm trying to track them in this GitHub issue [1] but a couple
       | people have remained more or less anonymous as they don't want to
       | attract attention too early.
       | 
       | The single PCIe lane is the biggest limitation if you're looking
       | for raw speed (350 MB/sec is kind of the upper real-world
       | sustained transfer limit), though since the gigabit Ethernet port
       | is on a different interface, you can still expect to get 80-100
       | MB/sec network transfer speeds.
       | 
       | Something like this, with the right case and OMV or other
       | adequate software would be a relatively competitive replacement
       | for low-end NASes.
       | 
       | I'm also exploring building a 2.5G NAS with a CM4, but the PCIe
       | bus speed limitation is what kinda hamstrings that. Hopefully the
       | next Pi revision has a 4x (at least) lane, like the RockPro64.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-
       | devices/iss...
        
         | rsync wrote:
         | "There are a few people currently working on NAS boards based
         | on the CM4."
         | 
         | I continue to appreciate the time and attention you are paying
         | to these new boards on your blog and in your comments here at
         | HN - thank you.
         | 
         | I am having trouble sourcing maxed out CM4 parts - that is, 8
         | GB ram and 32 GB onboard storage[1]. They are either sold out
         | until August or October or something silly like that _or_ they
         | are only available in 200+ quantity.
         | 
         | Do you have any suggestions as to where I could source those ?
         | 
         | [1] CM4008032, I think ...
        
         | youngtaff wrote:
         | Have you come across anyone producing a PoE board for the CM4 -
         | just looking for a network port, USB and perhaps SD card
         | (similar to a Ubquiti Cloud Key)?
         | 
         | (the Gumstix camera board is overkill for my needs)
        
           | ashtonkem wrote:
           | Can POE provide enough power to turn SATA drives? I kind of
           | figured for a NAS it probably makes sense to go with a
           | regular power supply, especially since it'll be mounted in an
           | easy to access location for drive replacement.
        
             | dingaling wrote:
             | 802.3at specifies max 30W at the output port at 600mA so in
             | theory you could shunt that to 5V and get about 5A after
             | losses. Enough to spin up a 3.5" SATA.
             | 
             | But most consumer retail PoE switches are only .3af
             | compliant which give 15W minus transmission losses.
        
               | conk wrote:
               | 802.3bt can provide higher power, easily enough to run a
               | few HDDs but there are few switches on the market that
               | offer 802.3bt. Almost nothing available for the
               | residential/consumer space.
        
           | rsync wrote:
           | "Have you come across anyone producing a PoE board for the
           | CM4 ..."
           | 
           | Wait, I thought the official CM4 breakout/dev board (the one
           | with the PCIe slot on it) had PoE, right ?
        
           | hnaccount141 wrote:
           | Waveshare has one. Haven't used it personally but it seems to
           | suit your needs. Though at ~$50 you're probably better off
           | just getting a Pi 4B + PoE hat.
           | 
           | https://www.waveshare.com/compute-module-4-poe-board.htm
        
           | PragmaticPulp wrote:
           | Why not use the regular Raspberry Pi 4 with the PoE module?
           | 
           | The CM4 is only useful in most cases if you want to use the
           | PCIe bus for something else, or if you're trying to embed it
           | in another product.
        
             | youngtaff wrote:
             | The existing PoE module is noisy as hell, and due to it's
             | design it's a PITA to fit a different fan
             | 
             | CM4 on a PoE baseboard offers far more cooling options
        
           | hansihe wrote:
           | A regular Raspberry Pi with a cheap POE USB-C splitter from
           | Aliexpress works very well.
           | 
           | https://a.aliexpress.com/_mMpvxGV
        
         | PragmaticPulp wrote:
         | 80MB/sec is actually quite fine for most NAS applications.
         | 
         | Anyone trying to get 10G speeds out of a high end NAS won't be
         | looking to Raspberry Pi solutions right now, anyway.
         | 
         | The real advantage, IMO, is that this helps kick off the
         | popularity of DIY NAS solutions based on ARM hardware. It's not
         | the first solution in this space, but Raspberry Pi is great for
         | taking things mainstream.
         | 
         | I imagine that a few years from now we'll have an even faster
         | Raspberry Pi to build a NAS around. These current-gen solutions
         | might be just what we need to get the software sorted out
         | before the powerful hardware arrives.
        
         | StillBored wrote:
         | Its sorta hard to justify those at the moment, since the XHCI
         | interface on the base Pi4B is more than capable of maximizing
         | the PCIe x1 interface. Basically, you can run a NAS at the
         | capabilities of the machine with random USB3 JBODs.
         | 
         | So a $100 5+ bay USB3 JBOD, RPi4B run over the 1G nic, and a
         | 64-bit arm64 distro (because rasbian will die with modern SATA
         | disks in a larger capacity JBOD) and you have a fairly
         | reasonable low end NAS for basically the price of the disks.
         | 
         | (or just plug in 4 of USB3 easystores/etc and save on the
         | enclosure).
        
           | 88 wrote:
           | I've done this (JBOD with USB 3.0 drives on a Pi 4) and it's
           | surprisingly effective.
           | 
           | I can easily saturate the 1G NIC which is more than
           | sufficient for my use case.
           | 
           | I don't use RAID or ZFS so neither the CPU or RAM are
           | limiting factors.
        
       | ausjke wrote:
       | Use RPi for NAS is really a stretch. Just buy those low-power x86
       | mini-itx boards with 4GB memory and 4 SATA ports along with
       | gigabit ethernet, they're around $150?
       | 
       | Note the smaller size of RPi-etc makes no sense when you're going
       | to host 4 hard drives anyways which takes quite some space on
       | their own, and you need a decent PSU for the drives too, and a
       | solid case as well, etc.
       | 
       | Just buy those ASRock mini-itx boards at newsegg or somewhere and
       | let RPi do what it's best at.
        
       | Naac wrote:
       | Here's what I want, but haven't been able to find:
       | 
       | I already have a beefy server at home ( it's actually a
       | refurbished enterprise workstation, with 24 cores, but read on ).
       | 
       | However it lacks drives. What I ideally want is a a dumb drive
       | bay I could buy, and then connect ( somehow ) to my existing
       | server, so I could use its CPU and RAM.
       | 
       | I don't want this drive bay to have its own CPU, I just want it
       | to hold data and transfer it over some wire. Ideally I would
       | achieve close to gigabit speeds requesting data off of this
       | server/drive bay.
       | 
       | Some options I've explored are those dumb quad storage bays that
       | connect over USB-3. But I was worried about running ZFS over a
       | USB interface, as well as potentially parallel read and writes
       | with the quality of the USB controller.
        
         | francis_t_catte wrote:
         | Hm, rack mounted fiberchannel drive enclosures exist (~$100
         | used on fleabay, usually sans disk trays), but that'd require a
         | fiberchannel card in your server, direct attach copper (or
         | fiber) cabling, and driver finagling.
        
         | njharman wrote:
         | Man, SCSI daisy chaining did this, what, 30yrs ago.
        
         | MrGilbert wrote:
         | Not sure what your workstation offers, but I bought myself an
         | Icy Dock Black Vortex (MB074SP-B) [1]. It's just a case
         | (internal 5,25", but that airflow! :D) which fits 4x3,5" drives
         | with a 120mm fan in front. Slapped some noise damping feets
         | under it. I then bought two low-profile eSATApd to internal
         | SATA slotpanels [2] and 4 corresponding cables [3]. Works great
         | so far!
         | 
         | And yes, you need eSATA, because the distance between cage and
         | machine might be enough to introduce read/write errors. That's
         | what I had, because I used normal SATA cables before.
         | 
         | [1]: https://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=166
         | 
         | [2]:
         | https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_61725/merkmale.html?setLang...
         | 
         | [3]:
         | https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_84402/merkmale.html?setLang...
        
         | KaiserPro wrote:
         | what you need is a JBOD!
         | 
         | Get a decent[1] external SAS adaptor, a SAS cable, and a second
         | hand enclosure and bob's your noisy uncle!
         | 
         | something like this: https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/dell-
         | powervault-md1220-sto...
         | 
         | https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/hp-z800-z820-external-mini...
         | 
         | Your workstation might even have a sas controller on it
         | already.
         | 
         | This might be overkill, but even with spinny disks you'll be
         | able to get fast random io[2]
         | 
         | [1] subjective. If yours is an enterprise workstation you'll
         | most likley be able to get an official SAS controller for it.
         | 
         | [2] well about 10 iops per drive.
        
       | EwanToo wrote:
       | You can have a lot of fun with Pi's, but I'm not sure I want to
       | build a multi-TB NAS using a Raspberry Pi with a pretty rare
       | addon board..
       | 
       | If you do want something like this, I think the ODROID-HC4[1] is
       | probably a better option.
       | 
       | 1 - https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc4
        
         | magicalhippo wrote:
         | Or just use USB3 - SATA connectors...
        
           | fogihujy wrote:
           | Yeah, USB drives with their own power supplies work very well
           | with the Pi, but I can imagine high workloads could quickly
           | run into problems and/or bottlenecks.
        
             | magicalhippo wrote:
             | True, though that bottleneck would mostly be with the Pi
             | itself. After all it only has GbE built-in, a single HD
             | will easily saturate that for sequential loads or all loads
             | for a SSD.
             | 
             | I have 8 disks hooked up to a Pi4 through USB3-SATA[1] with
             | external 12V, works quite well in terms of reliability (had
             | to turn on quirks mode[2] though). As I mentioned the main
             | limitation is the single 1GbE interface, but this is just
             | for archive data so.
             | 
             | [1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000001204302.html
             | 
             | [2]:
             | https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=245931
        
               | fogihujy wrote:
               | Yep, I've also noticed some unreliability when doing
               | things like adding a mirror drive; at some point the USB
               | controller just seems to fall off the horse and
               | everything crashes.
               | 
               | My setup mainly streams video/music over wifi and it's
               | rock solid at lower speeds. I wouldn't rely on it for any
               | heavy duty storage needs though.
        
         | AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
         | 2 disks is pretty limited, is there a 4+ disk version of this?
        
       | KaiserPro wrote:
       | As a cheap offsite destination for backup,(assuming you have
       | multiple destinations) this looks quite compelling.
       | 
       | Although I don't think ZFS is stable on the pi just yet[1], so
       | perhaps 4 sata drives is overkill.
       | 
       | I would be interested in a single sata/cm4 carrier board though.
       | 
       | [1]citation needed, I've not really looked...
        
       | smarx007 wrote:
       | Nothing against cool RPi projects but be aware that a motherboard
       | with a NAS-grade Celeron, like ASRock J4105M, sells for $85 or so
       | (but needs RAM, $20 for 4GB roughly). At $105, this leaves this
       | carrier board around $35 of budget if you can get RPi CM4 4GB for
       | $70. Plus all the doubts about reliability mentioned above.
        
         | jsight wrote:
         | I've noticed this regularly with RPi projects. They are
         | interesting, but the costs are often at least as high as an,
         | often more powerful, x86 equivalent.
        
           | PragmaticPulp wrote:
           | Keep in mind that the original goal of the Raspberry Pi
           | foundation was directed toward education.
           | 
           | Raspberry Pi has inspired a lot of people to get their hands
           | dirty with Linux and embedded systems, even if it's not the
           | optimal device from a pure engineering perspective.
           | 
           | In that regard, I'd call the Raspberry Pi a resounding
           | success.
        
             | giobox wrote:
             | This NAS board is only for the Pi CM4 "Compute Module" -
             | that is aimed at enterprise/embedded solutions, not
             | education like the standard Pi boards.
             | 
             | I think for this, it's absolutely appropriate to compare to
             | other solutions on market. Even the official Pi foundation
             | data sheet describes CM4 as for "deeply embedded
             | applications".
             | 
             | https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/cm4/cm4-datasheet.pdf
             | 
             | I would also recommend to carefully examine low-cost x86
             | options, they often do come out ahead given they usually
             | include all the stuff the Pi Foundation don't supply you -
             | a boot volume, case, power supply etc.
        
             | jsight wrote:
             | I agree, and I think they are phenomenal at that. There
             | isn't anything else that combines the versatility,
             | stability, and cost quite so elegantly for single Pi use
             | cases for education or light desktop use. I use several VLC
             | clients feeding monitors, for example, and they are
             | fantastic.
             | 
             | But I also see things like 10 node clusters with a total of
             | 40GB of RAM, a bunch of slow cores, and materials costs of
             | $500+. That's harder for me to understand, outside of the
             | "looks cool" metric.
        
         | 88 wrote:
         | Presumably that board will need a separate PSU, RAM, storage
         | for a boot drive, etc?
         | 
         | Also it only has two SATA ports so would need a PCIe expansion
         | card to match the four ports offered by the Pi board?
         | 
         | I suspect the Pi is also significantly more power efficient?
        
           | sneak wrote:
           | I recently picked up two 36 bay sata super micro 4Us on ebay
           | for ~$600 each.
           | 
           | The real cost is drives, not the thing you plug them into.
        
           | vladvasiliu wrote:
           | There are similar motherboards with 4 SATA ports. I have an
           | older Gigabyte GA-J3455N-D3H with 4 SATA ports and two
           | gigabit network controllers that cost in the same ballpark as
           | GP's model.
           | 
           | RAM is accounted for in GP's description.
           | 
           | Regarding the boot drive, you can either boot from the data
           | disks (say via a common ZFS pool or a common raid + lvm) or
           | if you're happy with a SD card for the PI, I suppose a small
           | USB drive would do the trick.
           | 
           | Regarding the PSU, but you'd need a beefy adapter anyway for
           | running 4 drives, which isn't cheap, and there are cheap
           | pico-atx PSUs available. I bought a compact case + PSU for my
           | board for 50 euros around two years ago [1] that's still
           | going strong (although I'm only running a single SSD in it),
           | so the PSU alone should be less than that.
           | 
           | There's of course the power efficiency question and I presume
           | this setup would be somewhat more power hungry than an RPI.
           | The Intel specs for the J3455 give it at 10W TDP. I have no
           | idea how much RAM consumes, but it's likely a few more watts.
           | 
           | [0]
           | https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-J3455N-D3H-rev-10#ov
           | 
           | [1] https://www.inter-tech.de/en/products/case/mini-itx-
           | nuc/itx-...
        
             | tutfbhuf wrote:
             | > Regarding the PSU, but you'd need a beefy adapter anyway
             | for running 4 drives
             | 
             | How about 2.5 inch drives? I'm thinking about: https://cdn-
             | reichelt.de/bilder/web/xxl_ws/A300/RPI_NAS_4XSAT...
        
               | roseway4 wrote:
               | I went looking for 2.5 inch NAS/ video recorder drives
               | this past weekend and came up empty handed. I'd hoped to
               | install them into a mini-pc NVR. The form-factor doesn't
               | appear to lend itself to the reliability drive
               | manufacturers target for this class of drive. They're
               | optimized for high write speeds and very high write
               | loads. You can of course use consumer laptop drives in a
               | NAS, but write speeds will be lower and reliability may
               | suffer.
        
               | tutfbhuf wrote:
               | > speeds will be lower and reliability may suffer
               | 
               | 1Gbps is the max. anyways for my home setup, no matter
               | how fast the drive is and I have a backup for important
               | stuff, I'm not dependent on enterprise NAS drives.
               | 
               | I want: extremely small, low cost and very low watt
               | usage.
        
               | vladvasiliu wrote:
               | The main issue is that larger capacity drives (> 2TB)
               | seem to be SMR in the 2.5" range. I've looked and haven't
               | found a PMR one (except maybe for "enterprise" drives
               | which cost more than an SSD). Depending on how you want
               | to use those drives, you may be having a bad time. For
               | example when rebuilding a ZFS pool. [0]
               | 
               | If your use case / setup allow you to deal with the
               | complete loss of your array (which, granted, is not 100%
               | likely) or don't use ZFS, then I suppose you could look
               | at Seagate's 2.5 Barracuda line. They're relatively cheap
               | given their capacity and I don't think they're
               | particularly unreliable in and of themselves.
               | 
               | [0] There are many people talking on the internet about
               | ZFS performance with SMR disks. Here's a quick find:
               | 
               | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-
               | smr...
        
               | vladvasiliu wrote:
               | Regarding power usage, I'm not very familiar with how
               | those drives compare [0]. To be honest, power consumption
               | was of interest for the build I was talking about because
               | I wanted it to be fanless (I actually ended up adding a
               | very silent fan, just for peace of mind). For my NAS
               | needs, I'm building in a recycled server, so power usage
               | isn't as much of a concern.
               | 
               | However, I did look for 2.5" drives (the server comes
               | with a 2.5" backplane) and there don't seem to be many
               | "consumer" drives in this format that are both high
               | capacity (>2 TB) and non SMR (I'll be running ZFS). I'm
               | also not looking to spend very much, so SSDs are out.
               | 
               | [0] Seagate specs for 2.5" Barracuda:
               | https://www.seagate.com/www-
               | content/datasheets/pdfs/barracud...
               | 
               | The startup current is 1.2 A under 5V. So if you're
               | running four of them, you'll need 24 W just for the
               | drives. Not sure if the "cheap" enclosures are able to
               | stagger drive startup.
               | 
               | My Gigabyte motherboard cannot, so it would require a PSU
               | large enough to drive both the board (CPU + RAM + etc)
               | and the drives for a little while. So with four drives,
               | you'd be looking at 50 W to be sure it fits.
        
         | m463 wrote:
         | I was thinking the same thing.
         | 
         | I love the pi and have many of them. But their beauty seems to
         | come out at the edge where things are low power and they
         | replace nonsense IOT devices.
         | 
         | To replace a server or desktop is a stretch. That's where using
         | a pi is death by 10,000 papercuts. The super-competitive low
         | end PC market gives you so many things for free, like good
         | power supplies, a wide variety of cases and silly things like
         | power switches and a clock with a battery.
        
       | Nursie wrote:
       | That looks a lot like the mainboard from the Western Digital
       | Sharespace I had about 10 years ago.
       | 
       | I was recently wanting a NAS again, but came to the conclusion
       | that the best bang for your buck was just grabbing a cheap mini-
       | ITX board and processor as the price of dedicated NAS boxes was
       | not much different and was far less flexible. Then you would have
       | full-fat sata, even m2 for a boot drive, whatever RAM you wanted
       | etc.
       | 
       | I know it's not a very exciting solution...
        
       | znpy wrote:
       | I wouldnt trust my data with this kind of devices. There's
       | nothing wrong per se, but I have my doubts about how easy you can
       | find replacement parts if something breaks in, say, a year or
       | two.
       | 
       | If you really depend on your data and want it to be safe, i'd
       | recommend spending the extra money and either getting a proper
       | nas (synology/qnap) or go the proper diy way (aka an x86 box and
       | truenas/unraid).
       | 
       | you really don't want to be in the position where you absolutely
       | need your data but the replacement parts are two-weeks far in the
       | future because they're travelling via snail mail or worse,
       | relying on 2nd-hand spare parts off ebay.
       | 
       | edit: not to mention, the gigabit ethernet port is a bottleneck.
       | you would probably hitting the bottleneck even by using four
       | rotational disks.
        
         | pmiller2 wrote:
         | If you're concerned about availability of parts, why not just
         | keep some cold spares around? It's not like we're talking about
         | expensive and specialized hardware here.
        
         | dsr_ wrote:
         | As a household backup device, rather than a NAS, this is
         | actually pretty good.
         | 
         | Use mdadm RAID-10 across four spinning disks, or RAID-1 across
         | a pair and have two slots free. If the board fails, you can
         | plug them into any other Linux box with SATA ports available.
         | 
         | Most people have no better than 1Gb/s ethernet available in
         | their house anyway. One expects a backup or restore to take a
         | while, but also not to be interactive.
         | 
         | It's probably cheaper to repurpose an old desktop, but this
         | will probably use less power, even when both are asleep.
        
           | znpy wrote:
           | > Most people have no better than 1Gb/s ethernet available in
           | their house anyway
           | 
           | This is partially true. Most people have no better than
           | 1Gb/sec _per single computer_. That means that a single pc
           | using the full 1Gb /sec would saturate the nas network I/O
           | and degrade performances for all other clients.
           | 
           | Which may or may not be okay... You just know to be aware of
           | that.
        
             | dsr_ wrote:
             | I keep saying backup, and other people keep re-saying NAS.
             | These are different.
             | 
             | A NAS can serve as a backup.
             | 
             | Not all backups are suitable as a NAS.
             | 
             | Now, let me restate: Most people have no networks capable
             | of significantly more than 1Gb/s between two hosts in their
             | house. Complaining that a backup server is also attached at
             | 1Gb/s is not going to cause people to discover that they
             | have already purchased 10Gb/s switches, or LACP switches,
             | or even acquire 2.5Gb/s switches.
             | 
             | Of the people who have 10Gb/s switches in their house,
             | approximately none of them are going to look at this very
             | low cost, low performance, low power system and say "yes!
             | this is my new primary backup system!"
        
               | toast0 wrote:
               | LACP switches aren't too bad. I picked up a pair of
               | 16-port switches with vlan and LACP (1-4 ports) via web
               | interface for around $100 combined.
               | 
               | 2.5G or 10G switching is still too expensive for me.
        
           | IgorPartola wrote:
           | ECC and zfs/btrfs I think are a must for any data you care
           | about. RAID 1 isn't going to save you when you can't tell
           | which copy of the given block is the corrupted one.
        
             | dsr_ wrote:
             | It completely depends on what your specific circumstances
             | are, and something is always better than nothing.
             | 
             | (Also, you aren't getting ECC RAM at this price point, no
             | matter what.)
             | 
             | What's a good use case for this? A house with a few
             | laptops, a desktop and one server. Everything uses the
             | server as their datastore. The server runs ZFS, but even
             | ZFS can run out of luck, so you send over a snapshot to the
             | backup device every day or three. It's insurance.
        
         | njharman wrote:
         | If you absolutely need your data its not only on one device.
        
         | whalesalad wrote:
         | If you aren't using hardware raid or another disk management
         | tool that locks you in to one manufacturer or worse one unique
         | controller - you should be able to take your disks to any other
         | machine and rebuild your array.
         | 
         | At least, that's how you should be constructing a home NAS if
         | that's what you're doing.
         | 
         | The same situation can arise with a popular/managed solution
         | like qnap/syno.
         | 
         | I have a DS918 and really love it (it's one of those set it and
         | forget it machines) but I don't totally know how it works. It's
         | Linux of course, but it's sorta a black box.
         | 
         | So I think there is a lot to be said for DIY as long as you are
         | aware of the drawbacks and engineer around them accordingly.
        
         | m3at wrote:
         | For the DIY way, I recommend the Helios64 if you're looking for
         | an ARM SBC with a complete NAS package: https://kobol.io/
        
           | znpy wrote:
           | I have seen that, it's a really nice alternative.
        
       | entangledqubit wrote:
       | The 12V/5A power supply seems a little undersized for 4 x 3.5 HDD
       | startup. I suspect that it's fine if the drives are started
       | sequentially but the drives will probably want to pull more than
       | 5A if they're all starting simultaneously. Possibly something to
       | watch out for.
       | 
       | 5A should be plenty for normal post-start operation.
        
       | the-dude wrote:
       | Title is misleading?
       | 
       | End of the article : _There's close to no information about the
       | software right now, and the hardware is not available yet_
        
       | gorgoiler wrote:
       | Nice, but the Gen10 HP ProLiant Microserver is my NAS platform of
       | choice.
       | 
       | It supports ECC and has 4 cable-free swappable bays plus space
       | for an SSD system drive in the top. The bolts-as-caddy system is
       | also a great idea.
        
         | rsync wrote:
         | My memory is hazy now but there was something weird/screwy
         | about the previous gen Microserver ... like, you couldn't use
         | all four SATA drives at the same time as booting from the
         | onboard ? Or something ?
         | 
         | How is the gen10 ? Can I use all four SATA drives for my raid
         | array but still have a SSD/m.2 boot drive ?
        
           | gorgoiler wrote:
           | I actually never took mine apart to put the SSD in the top
           | slot, I only know it's possible. (There is an additional
           | mounting kit to support it on the Gen10.)
           | 
           | For me, three mirrored ZFS 4TB drives are all I needed for my
           | local storage to be available and resilient. The fourth SATA
           | slot is the SSD in a cradle.
           | 
           | My long term bet for safety is offline USB mirrors on-site,
           | Borg off-site to rsync.net (thanks!) and tarsnap off-site for
           | the smaller stuff.
           | 
           | Maybe one day I'll be brave and use ZFS to mirror the content
           | to rsync.net? I haven't upgraded beyond ZoL 0.7 yet but if I
           | did can I replicate an encrypted pool to you without giving
           | you the keys?
        
         | [deleted]
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-02-01 23:02 UTC)