[HN Gopher] Kobol Team Is Pulling the Plug from "Helios64 Open S...
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Kobol Team Is Pulling the Plug from "Helios64 Open Source NAS"
Author : nixcraft
Score : 110 points
Date : 2021-08-25 09:42 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.kobol.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.kobol.io)
| starbugs wrote:
| That is really sad. The products looked really good and I had the
| feeling they were targeted at a very interesting niche that
| definitely needs to be covered.
| octopoc wrote:
| It seems like hardware could benefit a lot from more
| standardization. One of the big problems with a hardware project
| like this is that parts aren't fully interchangeable and
| therefore redesigns are necessary for minor part changes. If
| hardware parts were commodities instead of unique products with
| unique requirements, it would be a lot easier to handle supply
| chain disruptions.
|
| And supply chain disruptions have been so extremely painful in
| the past year, why doesn't the industry do this? It seems like if
| you could provide guarantees about interchangeability, that
| translate to guarantees about availability, people would be
| willing to pay a premium.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Sad news indeed, the Helios64 was promising although some users
| reported instability issues, but after some work it could have
| become a killer product. It's all Open Source though, so
| hopefully other people can join and take over the
| development/production, also showing in the process one more
| example (do we still need them?) why Open Source is the better
| choice.
| hajhatten wrote:
| Wish the team good luck in their new endeavors. You definetly had
| me impressed.
| 3np wrote:
| As sad as this is, I find it very refreshing with a transparent
| and honest update like this. I've seen so many initially
| promising hardware projects just fizzle out in uncertainty and
| radio silence.
|
| Especially that they are open with reasons why, what they feel
| they could have done better, and releasing blueprints allowing
| others to pick up.
|
| No doubt 2020/2021 must have been the most challenging years in
| decades for an indie team to launch a new hardware project like
| this.
|
| I was looking quite seriously at the Kobol64 last year; the only
| thing that eventually made me not preorder was realizing the RAM
| would not be sufficient for my purposes (ZFS-backed Glusterfs
| nodes).
| Scandiravian wrote:
| I got a Helios64 with the purpose of using testing how well it
| would work as a storage node in my self-hosted setup
|
| It worked okay for simple storage tasks and it's definitely
| great as a rpi alternative for simple setups, but not for any
| kind of serious cluster
|
| I still hope that there'll one day be a RISC-V or ARM board
| with a 10gbe port, 4-8 SATA ports, and 32gb-64gb ram
|
| Seems like the only option for redundancy at the hardware level
| for storage is refurbished server hardware or spending a lot of
| time on a DIY setup
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Does the SolidRun Honeycomb LX2 board not do what you need?
| It is certainly pricy ($750 without RAM, optics, a case, or
| drives), but powerful.
|
| _based on NXP's outstanding 16 core LX2160A Arm Cortex A72
| (2GHz) offering up to 64GB DDR4 (dual channel) and up to
| 40GbE._
|
| https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-
| platforms/h...
| Scandiravian wrote:
| Those boards look amazing!
|
| Any complaints I could have would honestly be nitpicking -
| it might honestly be a bit overkill for my use case.
|
| The price isn't too bad considering what a x86 alternative
| would cost (especially considering the electrical bill)
|
| Thank you for bringing them to my attention!
|
| Now the challenge will be, whether I can find a European
| seller
| 3np wrote:
| I'm quite happy with ASROCK RACK's X570 boards. AMD-based,
| 10GBe, up to 8 SATA straight from the board, up to 128GB RAM,
| come in both mITX and mATX variants. And they have IPMI! And
| an integrated super basic GPU so you can run the non-APU
| Ryzens without a dGPU.
|
| If you don't enjoy DIYing too much I'd recommend the mATX
| ones - the form factor and cooling alternatives for the mITX
| are... unorthodox.
|
| But yeah, comparable non-x86 accessible for prosumers will be
| years away.
| Scandiravian wrote:
| I have looked into exactly those boards and they by far
| seem like the best available solution. I'd be really
| interested in hearing about your experience with them
|
| Which type of case/chassis are you using for your set-up
| and how many nodes are you running?
| 3np wrote:
| I have 3x X570D4I-2T with Ryzen 3600. It's my
| understanding the new Zen3 should work just fine as well.
|
| * I gave up on finding a chassis that wasn't either
| gigantic, too tight, or crazy expensive. They run naked
| resting on cork-boards on a very cheap DIY shelf that
| I've hung some 140mm fans on. Looks a bit cyberpunk and
| swapping drives is super easy. You may have better luck
| with chassis if you're in the US.
|
| * ECC RAM supported, which is nice. I've understood you
| can't surveil the ECC, so I've seen it described as
| "semi-ECC". This is a Ryzen thing, not an ASROCK-RACK-
| thing.
|
| * ECC DDR4 SODIMMs are _expensive_ and rare. If you need
| ECC and lots of RAM but don 't care about the small form
| factor, a bigger board will be a lot more cost-efficient.
| I got my sticks from Nemix and Samsung.
|
| * Intially I had stability issues and errors in memtest.
| Completely disappeared after putting them behind a UPS;
| turned out the culprit was power fluctuations in my
| previous house.
|
| * They need a PSU with EPS (my old leftover 15y/o PSU in
| the closet only booted the IPMI, not the board itself.
| Silverstone SFX 450W is great and cheap)
|
| * (Specific for mITX) The CPU socket has bastard Intel
| fittings. I got Scythe Shoten and Noctua on there fine in
| the end, but it took some anxious-inducing creativity
| with M3 screws/nuts and DIY spacers,
|
| * IPMI and monitoring are great for initial setup and if
| something would go wrong. Flashing UEFI/BIOS is a breeze.
|
| * Apart from the on-board SATA I plopped in 4xM.2 PCIe
| bifurcator cards from 10Gtek - so besides the boot drive
| I can have 4xM2 NVMe drives on each board. Works great.
|
| * I'd really really like to figure out something more
| compact PSU-wise - either Meanwell or Pico-style - but
| electricity is not my strong side and despite researching
| quit a bit I still haven't figured out exactly what I
| should buy and how I would hook that up.
|
| Overall I'm happy. It's quite impressive how much IO you
| can get out of such a small board. But since I moved to a
| bigger house and the mATX model came out I'd have bought
| that instead if it was today.
|
| In case you haven't checked out the servethehome forums
| already there are some people writing about their boards
| there as well.
|
| Oh, and since you mentioned redundant storage: Glusterfs
| is great, except when it isn't. I have issues with it
| every now and then (files being stuck in heal without
| going in split-brain requiring low-level manual
| intervention, and fuse mounts on other nodes randomly
| disconnecting with "transport error" until I manually
| remount, despite always having min 2/3 nodes continuously
| online). I kind of wish I went with Ceph or LizardFS or
| something instead but I sunk so much time into Gluster
| already and have better things to do than start over with
| something new - and who knows if the grass would actually
| be greener.
| Scandiravian wrote:
| That's a fantastic rundown - thank you so much for taking
| the time to write such a comprehensible explanation!
|
| I live in a rather small apartment (56 square metres), so
| I'm trying to find an acceptable trade-off between noise
| and space. I'm in Europe, so sourcing parts can
| unfortunately be a bit of a challenge, so I'll probably
| have to be creative to solve some issues (which honestly
| is also fun)
|
| I had found a couple of 2U racks that could hold 2 mITX
| boards, but the lack of cooling options made me nervous
| whether it would get too hot
|
| With you now writing that you would have gone with the
| mATX board if you were making the build today, I think
| I'll probably go with that instead - especially since I'd
| like to use ECC ram, and you mention that ECC SODIMMs are
| expensive and difficult to find
|
| I've been reading a lot of reviews on servethehome, but
| haven't gone through their forums yet. I'll make sure to
| check it out - thanks for the tip!
|
| I haven't yet decided whether I'll go with ceph, gluster,
| or something else entirely. I'm leaning towards ceph, but
| I've read several warnings about running only 3 nodes in
| a ceph cluster, so it's (once again) a matter of figuring
| out a good trade-off
|
| In any case - you've definitely helped me out here and I
| really appreciate that you took the time to write such a
| comprehensive explanation
| mastax wrote:
| The power connectors on that board are strange - it's
| almost ATX12VO but not quite. Does the motherboard come
| with the 24-to-4-pin adapter?
|
| Assuming you need AC->DC an SFX power supply is probably
| your best option. It's hard to find generic power
| supplies that have power good, 5VSB, and remote PS_ON.
| The generic supplies of reasonable cost are almost
| certainly less efficient as well.
| moepstar wrote:
| Wow, that actually sounds awesome and something that
| could finally enable me to retire my shitty QNAP NAS and
| my Proxmox "Server" running on an old i7 2nd gen
| desktop...
|
| If you don't mind, how much power/watts does one of these
| draw continously?
| spijdar wrote:
| Besides some of the ARM options like the Honeycomb that
| have been mentioned, there are also the POWER9 systems from
| Raptor Computing Systems. Much more expensive than the x86
| systems, but I feel compelled to mention them, since they
| have mATX boards with most of those yummy features (fewer
| SATA ports but higher RAM capacity, for instance).
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This is exactly what I've done, by the way. Same mITX
| motherboard you cite below with a Ryzen without integrated
| graphics (since the board itself supports VGA). 10 GbE and
| a whole bunch of SATA lanes. I didn't bother with trying to
| get it into a real chassis. I just grabbed a desktop case
| from Fractal Design that can hold 10 disks and it fits fine
| in my wall-mounted entertainment center cabinet below my
| television. It's in there with my router, a switch, and a
| few Minisforum small form factor Ryzen PCs. The only
| "gotcha" with cooling is you need to use a CPU cooler meant
| for Intel even though the chip is Ryzen, but the board
| documentation clearly tells you this. I'm just using simple
| Noctua low-profile fans. I also cut some holes in the
| cabinet and put in USB-powered cabinet fans, so I can keep
| the doors closed.
|
| So sure, it's DIY and some work, but putting together the
| NAS itself and putting together the cabinet, including the
| cooling and wiring, only took one weekend.
|
| It consumes more power compared to ARM, but I'm cooling a
| 4-story house with 18 foot ceilings in Texas anyway, so
| it's not a noticeable difference.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-
| platforms/h...
|
| ?
| [deleted]
| mnd999 wrote:
| This feels like the 80/20 rule in action. These boards mostly
| work but had (in my experience) non-trivial reliability and
| quality issues and they would have been expensive and tricky to
| get fully right.
|
| The cynic in my says another company will probably pop up shortly
| with a new Icarus128 NAS board.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Very sad news, I was looking forward to the ECC variant.
|
| What's the smallest ECC NAS board on the market right now?
| dtx1 wrote:
| The Kobol Team did a much better job than any of the other ARM
| Vendors with their devices. The Wiki always detailed EVERY PART
| of the Hardware and their devices ran mainline kernel the day i
| bought them. I have come to hate almost every other ARM Device
| because at the end of the day the software support was only good
| enough when the hardware was already dying of old age. It's a
| little easier with no GPU to support though.
|
| That being said, Kobos never delivered quality hardware. My
| Helios4 died, likely the PSU, early Helios64 needed a botch job
| for their LAN Ports to work correctly and they never delivered on
| the ECC RAM needed for a NAS. Performance on the Helios4 was also
| absolutely crappy, never being able to deliver gigabit speeds
| over the LAN Port. I wish them all the best though, my personal
| hardware is going to be x86 for the foreseeable future unless ARM
| makes MAJOR strides in terms of linux compatibility
| wronex wrote:
| Does anyone know of a similar product? I'm particularly impressed
| by the built in UPS and five bay storage.
| dpedu wrote:
| I have a somewhat similar project based around the raspberry
| pi. It's rather DIY compared to Helios64's project - 3d printed
| case, hand soldered electronics, amazon sourcing - though the
| goals are similar. Specifically, my goals were to host 2x 3.5"
| drives and to be printable on a standard 200x200 mm 3d printer.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/n277ip/raspber...
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Yeah that's a great idea for saving space and would be perfect
| if it automatically shut down after the battery gets low
| 3np wrote:
| Doesn't exist AFAIK unless something new was announced in the
| last couple of months that I missed - I researched quite a lot
| a little bit back.
|
| Somewhat similar scopes but without both of those:
|
| https://wiretrustee.com/raspberrypi-cm4-sata-board/ (not
| launched yet)
|
| https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/sata-hat/products/pe...
| (they also have an enclosure kit)
|
| https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/ (just 2 drives; I
| have one as a sink for automated ZFS snapshots using zrepl; a
| friend is using one for syncthing+apple time machine sink)
|
| If you want something within the coming ~2 years and any of the
| above don't fit your bill I think you'll have to resort to x86
| and an external UPS. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
| squarefoot wrote:
| I've built a couple NAS machines off Atom Mini-ITX boards, and
| in one case I supplied the mainboard and the two disks using a
| PicoPSU 12V adapter. Once the system accepts 12V, the UPS can
| be a car/motorcycle battery left inline as buffer, so that in
| case of blackout there's no switching involved. Not compact as
| the Helios64 UPS, but it works and is less risky than having
| two Lithium cells near the drives. I didn't try this
| configuration as my PicoPSU needed quite accurate 12V input,
| which the car batteries would exceed when fully charged, but
| their M3-ATX Automotive model accepts from 6 to 24 volts making
| ideal, as the name implies, for being supplied by a car
| battery.
|
| Regarding the 5 bay storage, you can buy backplanes with pull
| out bays for 5*3.5 disks that would fit into 3*5.25 bays. A
| search for "3 to 5 sata backplane" returns some products.
| quux wrote:
| That's a real shame. I have a Helios64 that has been rock solid
| since launch and I was thinking of getting another one if they
| ever became available again.
|
| Thank you Kobol team and thank you for the openness and
| transparency the whole time.
| jeremycarter wrote:
| Still running my original Helios4. Hasn't missed a beat for 4+
| years.
| dtx1 wrote:
| I STRONGLY recommend getting a new PSU asap. The PSUs they send
| are dying one after another at the moment and mine likely took
| the board with it.
| paulhart wrote:
| As another currently-happy Helios4 owner, any
| recommendations?
| dtx1 wrote:
| https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16494-psu-voltage-pinouts-
| fo...
| xtanx wrote:
| Nooo. I really wanted a Helios64. Good luck to the team and I
| hopefully someone can create a similar product.
| simjue wrote:
| Same for me. I planned to replace my old NAS with a Helios64
| :-(
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Sad to see it end, but I appreciate the honesty.
|
| One of the huge challenges with building niche, enthusiast
| hardware is that you have fewer resources than a bigger company,
| yet enthusiast customers tend to be far more demanding than
| normal. The Helios products look fantastic, but even in this HN
| thread you can see potential customers explaining why they wanted
| more out of the product (Mostly RAM). I have a feeling their fate
| would have been a lot of people agreeing it was a cool product
| but then going off and buying something else after doing some
| research.
|
| ARM boards are hard right now because we're not quite to the
| point of powerful, high-RAM systems being affordable, so most
| things are a compromise. In retrospect, I wish they would have
| applied their obviously fantastic product engineering skills to
| building an awesome NAS case first that accepted a standard Mini-
| ITX board. From there, they could have partnered with a Nano-ITX
| board vendor to offer a smaller V2, then as they picked up
| momentum they could branch into the custom all-in-one solution.
| Trying to jump straight to a full custom product from top to
| bottom is extremely hard, to say the least.
| rjsw wrote:
| > ARM boards are hard right now because we're not quite to the
| point of powerful, high-RAM systems being affordable
|
| I get the feeling that most ARM SoC vendors had made their
| first 64-bit products by just pasteing a 64-bit CPU into their
| previous 32-bit SoC design. It is only recently that reasonably
| cheap 8GB boards have become available.
| gumby wrote:
| The business model of Mediatek, Rockchip etc is not to sell
| chips on a traditional merchant basis. They don't even
| produce data sheets. So there isn't much value for them in
| working on reference boards.
|
| Their model is to qualify a customer by volume and then
| provide a "solution": IC with a custom linux or android on
| it, including undocumented drivers etc.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| This reminds of an exchange I read between a Rockchip dev and
| a kernel maintainer. The Rockchip dev wrote the following as
| justification for special handling of their board:
|
| _There are many legacy IPs which only support 32bit bus, we
| have to use them as is in the new 64bit SoCs, I think the
| 32bit GIC can be considered the same as those case, can we
| add CONFIG_ZONE_DMA32 support in GIC driver?_
|
| https://lore.kernel.org/linux-rockchip/874kg0q6lc.wl-
| maz@ker...
|
| Note that this is in regards to their new rk356x platform,
| which supports up to 8 GB of RAM.
| ksec wrote:
| Cant blame them. There are no end in sight with component
| shortage. I mean within the NAS market, if Synology and Qnap are
| having trouble with supply. It is quite literally impossible to
| get anything done during these difficult time with the small
| volume they are making.
|
| Rather than hoping or praying things will change ( it wont ), I
| do appreciate their honest take on the issue.
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