[HN Gopher] Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS
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Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS
Author : geerlingguy
Score : 114 points
Date : 2021-12-22 15:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
| FpUser wrote:
| Pi 4 is unobtanium now. One of my projects is screwed at the
| moment because of that
| rcpt wrote:
| What do you need the pi for? The size? Intel NUC is
| substantially more powerful and after power bank, SD, case etc
| you end up paying about the same
| magicalhippo wrote:
| OTOH if you need the GPIO, power consumption or form factor
| it's hard to beat a Pi. They're not the best on power, but
| they're better than a NUC.
| FpUser wrote:
| I am well aware about NUCs. I do not really want to talk here
| why I need Pi in particular. I am however amazed at how
| easily people here make whole bunch of assumptions that have
| nothing to do with the actual case.
| lunfard000 wrote:
| Raspberry is not really cheap anymore. The start package (rp4 4gb
| + charger + sd + ethernet/hdmi cables) is 100 euros in my
| country.
|
| Meanwhile you can get a GK3V mini pc on Aliexpress with a j4125,
| 8gb LPDDR4 and 256GB SSD for 180 euros, which probably has 3x-4x
| the performance of the pi.
| orev wrote:
| I've found this to be the case for most of the time Raspberry
| Pis have been around. The cost proposition has always relied on
| using other components people have "lying around", like the
| power adapter, SD card, etc. However as the power quality
| requirements have gone up for each Pi release, old AC adapters
| can't be used anymore, SD cards need to be better quality to
| handle the writes, and you want a case for it, etc. From my
| perspective you've always been looking at close to $100 to get
| everything you need for it to be useful.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| The kits are always going to be marked up--and even more so
| today, since it's so hard to find individual Pis in stock
| anywhere.
|
| Here in the US, the only way for many people to get a Pi 4 is
| in a kit that's at least $100 (sometimes scalped and marked up
| to $150-200 on Amazon or eBay). Until about 3 months ago,
| though, I could reliably find a model I wanted from Micro
| Center or one of the official Pi online resellers for $35-75
| (list price).
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Any reason why this is the case? Chip shortages? Backing up
| of imports?
|
| I just noticed this the other day when looking to get a Pi 4
| as a gift for my brother. It's crazy to think just a year or
| two ago I bought two at normal price, and now one can't find
| any individual boards anywhere really
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Mostly the chip shortages--Raspberry Pi has pulled out all
| the stops but couldn't come anywhere close to meeting
| demand over 2021. And they even decided to focus production
| only on the BCM2711-based devices for the latter part of
| this year.
|
| They posted a blog post with some detail behind what's
| going on: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-
| shortages-and-...
| frampytown wrote:
| I'd be interested if anyone can comment on commercial bulk
| procurement of Pis. Any idea what the volume discounts are? And
| also would be interesting to know what the supply has been like
| for the past year(s) for commercial customers.
|
| I've heard anecdotally that most Pis sold are used in industry,
| so wouldn't be surprised if they're being prioritized.
| justin66 wrote:
| That's quite a markup you're experiencing. A conversion based
| on US prices makes it seem like you should be able to get that
| stuff for a little more than sixty Euros. If you can get it at
| all: availability is tough right now all over, I assume.
|
| Is that price difference about shipping costs or VAT or what?
|
| > GK3V mini pc
|
| That is a very cool looking thing, but targeting a different
| use case, I would think.
| lunfard000 wrote:
| idk, maybe you get it a bit cheaper if you look around. This
| is from a offical store though:
| https://www.raspberrystore.nl/PrestaShop/complete-
| sets/245-r...
| wila wrote:
| It's the rest of the kit that makes it expensive.
|
| If you don't need all the parts, then you can shave some
| off.
|
| https://www.kiwi-electronics.nl/nl/merk-raspberry-pi
| lunfard000 wrote:
| I mean, at the very least you always need a charger and a
| sd card, the barebone price is kinda misleading
| liuliu wrote:
| @geerlingguy, in the post, do you use RAID5 as in madam or RAIDZ1
| as in ZFS? Is this bcache setup in front of madam or ZFS?
|
| I am actually interested in hearing downsides if bcache used in
| front of ZFS besides obvious data implications (single copy v.s.
| multiple).
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I documented everything in excruciating detail in this GitHub
| issue [1] -- but in summary it was RAID5 created by mdadm (to
| replicate what the Drivestor 4 Pro does via ADM--it doesn't
| have ZFS as an option), and bcache set up on top of that with
| an EXT4 filesystem.
|
| [1] https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-
| devices/iss...
| quux wrote:
| Link to youtube version:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3jwQzb46Zc
| moondev wrote:
| Compare this to another aarch64 system, honeycomb lx2
|
| esxi for arm on the lx2 now supports pcie passthru of it's
| PCIe3.0 x8 slot. I successfully passed the nvme controller and a
| 25GbE port from a ConnectX-4 into an ubuntu 21.10 uefi aarch64 vm
|
| Linux chad-SolidRun-CEX7-Platform 5.13.0-22-generic #22-Ubuntu
| SMP Fri Nov 5 13:22:27 UTC 2021 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux
|
| 02:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co
| Ltd NVMe SSD Controller SM981/PM981/PM983 (prog-if 02 [NVM
| Express]) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD
| Controller SM981/PM981/PM983
|
| 0a:00.0 Ethernet controller: Mellanox Technologies MT27710 Family
| [ConnectX-4 Lx] Subsystem: Mellanox Technologies Stand-up
| ConnectX-4 Lx EN, 25GbE dual-port SFP28, PCIe3.0 x8,
| MCX4121A-ACAT
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I've been wanting to test out one of Solid Run's boards, but
| haven't had the opportunity. Have you done any benchmarking to
| see how much throughput you actually get? I would hope it's a
| lot more than the Pi, but can't know until it's thoroughly
| tested!
|
| One thing to note: the Honeycomb LX2 is listed at $750 :)
| moondev wrote:
| Planning to benchmark it a bit later today, thanks for
| sharing your scripts I will start there and share with you
| via gh.
|
| Also happy to report GPU + audio fully working on ubuntu
| 21.10 aarch64-uefi. GPU is nvidia gt710 in the pcie3x8 slot
| via nouveau drivers. May take a crack at some unigine
| benchmarks later :)
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Excellent! I may have to find a way to get one...
| zamadatix wrote:
| At $750 without memory, storage, or case and only offering a x8
| PCIe 3.0 slot it seems to lose the advantage of being cheap
| while still being worse than a non-ARM64 box in terms of
| interfaces (and likely performance).
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I bought a Pi 4 with the intention of using it as a services box
| for a Synology NAS, but it turns out that hosting a Postgres
| cluster over the network isn't a good idea.
|
| I've since moved the data onto an SSD directly connected to the
| Pi and use the NAS purely as a backup mechanism, which I guess
| was the point of having a NAS to begin with. I get the impression
| that trying to run things directly on the NAS is cumbersome with
| Synology's OS.
| mikece wrote:
| After watching Geerling's video on YouTube about building an ARM
| NAS I almost went that direction -- but opted for a Synology
| DS918+ instead because my need for a NAS is not just experimental
| but something that needs to work reliably.
| Lownin wrote:
| What happens when the Sinology dies? Do I have to buy another
| Synology to mount my array again? Does it have to be the same
| model, or family of models?
| aparks517 wrote:
| I'd lean toward restoring from backup either way, since the
| hardware failure might have caused data corruption that's not
| immediately obvious.
| psz wrote:
| Yeah. You can pull drives out and mount them in regular
| Linux. Synology uses standard Linux tools.
|
| https://kb.synology.com/DSM/tutorial/How_can_I_recover_data_.
| ..
| mikece wrote:
| I haven't tried pulling one of the drives from my system and
| trying to read it with another box but I imagine just about
| any Linux system should be able to read BTRFS drives, no?
| Under the covers Synology's DSM is Linux with some
| proprietary apps on top.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Yeah I know at least ASUSTOR's ADM and Synology's DSM are
| both basically lightweight Linux distros (usually on an
| older kernel than what you'd expect building something
| custom), and they use standard Linux storage tooling (for
| mdadm RAID or btrfs).
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I haven't tested it on Synology, but at least on ASUSTOR, the
| RAID arrays are set up using mdadm internally--so I was able
| to pull the drives, plug them into a Pi through a SATA card,
| and recover the array pretty easily using mdadm.
|
| The vendor NASes do seem to add extra partitions besides just
| one main 'md0', though--so you probably couldn't expect to
| yank the drives from a Synology and pop them into an ASUSTOR
| directly.
|
| I also tested pulling drives configured in the Drivestor and
| putting them in the Lockerstor, and that worked, but there
| were quirks if I tried in the opposite direction.
|
| In the end, I would rather make sure I have a
| complete/separate backup of the NAS before attempting to move
| the drives, just in case.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| And I use pi's as interchangeable/swappable processors for a
| variety of different tasks. Its only casing which people tend
| to miss with pi's which can be addressed with 3d printing.
| Hamuko wrote:
| My Synology has been anything but realiable in the past month
| or so. I've twice had to hard reboot it because it stops
| working. I think it stops writing all data, which means that
| even something as simepl as "echo "" > out" will hang forever.
| Can't even turn it off because DSM stops responding and "sudo
| reboot" hangs.
|
| I have no idea whether it's a disk going bad, the file system
| going bad or the entire device going bad. It did give a warning
| that an I/O command timed out on one of the disks, but I've yet
| to get a S.M.A.R.T. extended test completed on the disk.
| no_time wrote:
| Does it hang with ssh timing out? In that case, next time it
| hangs try opening it up and logging in via the UART interface
| available on most Synology NASes. Also it may give you extra
| info if the kernel panicks.
| Hamuko wrote:
| No, it's usually just the individual command that hangs.
| I'm pretty sure I could just ^C end the `echo "" > out`
| command.
| hackshack wrote:
| I agonized about this for years. I wanted a proper server, not
| something embedded or a Pi with a rat's nest of cables, that
| would still fit in a credenza in the living room.
|
| Ended up getting an HP MicroServer Gen8 and absolutely love it.
| Same cube design as the DS918+, but with proper iLO (remote
| media, etc.), lots of boot options, and very stoutly built. It
| feels like a real HP DL300-series server (the Gen9 does not
| IMHO). I bought it as it was being discontinued.
|
| It's running VMware ESXi with FreeNAS on top of that, with an
| LSI SAS card connected to the drive bays, then hardware-pass-
| through'ed to the FreeNAS VM. I've got the home's DNS server,
| Pi-hole, Unifi controller, test VMs, etc. happily virtualized
| alongside FreeNAS. 16GB RAM total, with 8GB dedicated to
| FreeNAS. Boot is off a microSD card (on the motherboard,
| naturally) and VM datastore is on an SSD connected where the
| optical drive would go.
|
| I know I'm violating several recommendations here (low RAM,
| virtualized FreeNAS, SAS card passed through, etc. etc.) but it
| does indeed work, very well in fact. 2+ years of serving the
| home. With the Gen8, HP built almost the perfect home server
| for tech-oriented types... pity they cost-reduced its
| successor.
| zerkten wrote:
| You are right that Synology (or an equivalent appliance) is
| often best. It's more complicated for geeks and data hoarders
| once we've been using a Synology for a while.
|
| When people go down the Synology path they are often running
| apps and doing more than providing a big pool of storage. I'm
| finding that my needs have changed towards my NAS being only a
| pool of storage on my local network. It is there as the first
| tier of backups to speed up disaster recovery. I feel confident
| that I could move to a more DIY NAS solution because it would
| only be used for NAS storage.
|
| It's not ideal, but an old desktop is now much better for my
| app needs, including Plex. Ideally, I'd have a single app box
| with the power consumption of 4-5 Raspberry Pi. I have only
| found a couple of ARM server solutions which are fairly old and
| ARM doesn't have standard sockets etc. because the focus seems
| to be on SoC instead of replicating what I'm used to with PCs
| and ATX mobos.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I have used an ARM Synology NAS but found it highly
| inadequate for running services ... or anything but basic
| storage, really.
|
| Only the x86 models support running Linux containers,
| packaging an application for Synology didn't exactly seem
| easy to to and the UI is almost unusably sluggish and has
| super confusing UX (it emulates a desktop environment in the
| browser ... right, very cool).
|
| Running an own standard Linux-based NAS is more effort, but
| not terribly so. The additional flexibility may be worth it:
| It makes it quite painless to integrate with other data
| sources and sinks for backups and stuff and can run a lot of
| personal services (home automation, budgeting tool, IRC
| bouncer ...).
| tyingq wrote:
| There seemed to be change on their low-end stuff when the
| DS120j/220j came out. The processor and RAM finally seemed
| enough to not spin off into oblivion, if you avoided the
| software that catalogs image files.
|
| They are dual-core, 512MB RAM, where the previous DS110j
| was single core, 128MB RAM and the DS115j was single core,
| 256MB RAM. The previous models just ran way too close to
| CPU starvation or swapping hell.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Still happy after 4 years with my Odroid XU4/Cloudshell2 -
| now runs with Dual 16TB. But yes, it is only a storage
| backend (for Borg Backups), not much more.
| t-3 wrote:
| The HD controller? (the main IC in the center of the front-
| panel board) in my Cloudshell 2 imploded recently, now I am
| stuck trying to figure out what to do. I really don't want
| to shell out for a whole new NAS, and the XU4 is still
| running great after repasting the heatsink... but it
| randomly loses the drives when there's too much activity (I
| tried libata.force=1.5G, but no luck).
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Likely the USB-Cable from XU4 to HD controller - exchange
| it. Hardkernel confirmed that their cables were poor
| quality and resulted in many disconnects. Mine were gone
| after exchanging cables.
|
| I have to say my Odroid only runs once a week - started
| remotely through IPSEC for offsite backups. So it is not
| a 24/7 setup.
| t-3 wrote:
| It's not the cable - the main IC in the board that the
| drives plug into "imploded" - there are cracks in package
| and it's sunken in. I was running it for ~4 years
| essentially 100% uptime, but took it down in early 2019
| and didn't get it set back up until now.
| timbit42 wrote:
| What do you think about Synology only allowing their rebranded
| Toshiba drives to work in their NAS? That's a deal breaker for
| me.
|
| EDIT: Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596179
| windowsrookie wrote:
| I have schucked Western Digital Element drives in my Synology
| NAS with no issues. Hundreds (maybe thousands?) of people on
| Reddit are doing this with no issues.
| kencausey wrote:
| Where did you get that idea? Below are links to Synology
| acknowledged compatible drives with multiple brands and even
| that doesn't imply that only these will work:
|
| https://www.synology.com/en-
| us/compatibility?search_by=produ...
|
| https://www.synology.com/en-
| us/compatibility?search_by=produ...
| johngalt wrote:
| That's a Synology released four years ago. Contrast with a
| model released in February this year. Not a single drive
| non-Synology drive on the HCL larger than 4TB:
|
| https://www.synology.com/en-
| us/compatibility?search_by=produ...
|
| It's not a hard requirement to use Synology drives, but on
| the newer/higher-end models the options to not use Synology
| drives are very limited. For example the FS2500 only has
| four models of SSD on the HCL and two are Synology.
|
| IMHO, the price premium for the Synology branded drives is
| reasonable. Pay for the validated drives. Maintaining a
| broad HCL is no small task.
|
| https://blog.synology.com/in-pursuit-of-reliability-
| hat5300-...
| sigjuice wrote:
| Is there a specific Synology NAS model with this restriction?
|
| I happen to have Western Digital drives in my Synology
| DS920+.
| timbit42 wrote:
| 12-bay and rack units? Source:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596179
| erikprotagonist wrote:
| The last Synology box I configured, a RS4021xs+, has
| currently a "System health" status of "Danger: The system
| is now in a dangerous status". In Storage manager every
| drive is listed as "Unverified" and with a red triangle.
| (Seagate ST18000NM disks, so quite common.)
|
| I configured it about a year ago. Before I updated to
| what was then a beta version of DSM it refused to install
| all together, which was quite frustrating.
|
| The list of supported drives according to Synology is
| depressingly short for this model - the only non-Synology
| or Toshiba drive is a single Western Digital.
| [deleted]
| halfdan wrote:
| That's just someone saying that - not an actual source.
| Anyone can claim anything on the internet.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| That's a strange lie. Where did it originate?
|
| Synology supports a wide range of drives, including in mixed
| co figurations - size- and brand-wise.
| Arcuru wrote:
| Do you have a reference for that? I setup a Synology very
| recently with non-Toshiba drives.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596179
| MR4D wrote:
| THIS is a reference, not that crappy link you had.
|
| https://www.synology.com/en-
| us/compatibility?search_by=categ...
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| That's not a reference. Someone else just said that with
| no further backing behind it.
| ashton314 wrote:
| I have Western Digital drives in mine... it's been solid and
| was very easy to set up.
| KronisLV wrote:
| You know, i think that ARM is really good for personal computing!
|
| However, right now i'm planning on adding more HDDs to my current
| homelab, which is made of low power last gen x86 hardware, but
| even so just 2 boxes with 200 GEs inside currently pull around
| 100W in total from the wall (PSUs are probably not awfully
| efficient either, to be honest).
|
| That said, having PCI lanes does keep me hopeful - while i have 4
| SATA ports on the mobo, expansion cards could bring that number
| up pretty nicely. I reckon that i could have about 8 HDDs in each
| box on consumer hardware with few to no issues, while also using
| them as servers with ~32 GB of RAM for my container clusters.
|
| If i had to start over, would i go for a Raspberry Pi or an
| equivalent cluster, or maybe a dedicated NAS? Maybe, as long as
| ARM software isn't too hard to come across, and the limited RAM
| or other expandability doesn't become too much of a problem.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| Frankly I'm fed up with pi's: they're not reliable at all for
| 24/7 uses cases.
|
| I have a PI 3 at work that needs frequent hard reboots because it
| fails to read the USB peripheral it's connected to.
|
| I also have half dozen PI 4 connected to big screens, that
| randomly fail to show anything (black screen). They need several
| hard reboot to get back to work.
|
| My boss wasn't convinced that it was the pis fault. To prove it,
| I just connected an old PC tower on one of the screen: this setup
| never caused any problem in months.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You're probably using an unreliable power supply. Use something
| official, and put any USB peripherals on a separately powered
| hub.
| riedel wrote:
| Interesting to see that the raspi foundation is in the
| business of PSU certification. It kind of weirdly feels like
| the next gen Apple...
| jmnicolas wrote:
| They all run with the official power supply.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Are you using official cables too? Cause all my Pi
| instabilities have come from power supply issues, and in
| all cases the problem was actually due to crappy cables.
|
| I bought a cheap USB cable tester[1] from AliExpress and
| ended up throwing away half my cables.
|
| [1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32973869742.html
| (random store, feel free to find another)
| sgarland wrote:
| I have a Pi 4 that's been rock stable, running both Hypriot w/
| Docker containers, and recently, TalosOS w/ full k8s. Single-
| node k8s on a Pi is horrendously slow during changes, if you're
| wondering, but it's fast enough once everything is stable. I
| have it running JupyterLab right now. Don't really notice a
| difference in speed once the kernel launches for tinkering-
| level scripts.
|
| Mine is powered via PoE FWIW.
| abe-101 wrote:
| I've been running a pi at home for more than a half a year now.
| It's running multiple web services, like my personal blog
| https://habet.dev/blog nextcloud, wireguard, pihole and more.
|
| Lately I started writing blog posts detailing the set up:
| https://habet.dev/self-hosting-and-securing-web-services-out...
|
| I haven't had any issues with it!
| Hamuko wrote:
| I have a Raspberry Pi running Wireguard that's pretty reliable
| - but it's really just running Wireguard.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| I bought a Synology not for the hardware, but the software. I
| went down the FreeNAS/TrueNAS rabbithole before. But it's a pain
| and the Synology software lets me get things setup easier.
| yumraj wrote:
| I was thinking of going the other way, from synology to TrueNas
| Scale since is Linux based.
|
| Are you suggesting that that's a fool's errand and I shouldn't
| do that?
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(page generated 2021-12-22 23:02 UTC)