[HN Gopher] Axzez Interceptor carrier board for RPi CM4 gets 8-p...
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       Axzez Interceptor carrier board for RPi CM4 gets 8-port PoE+ board
        
       Author : teleforce
       Score  : 26 points
       Date   : 2022-04-30 19:07 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.cnx-software.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.cnx-software.com)
        
       | bick_nyers wrote:
       | This is very cool, but SATA ports are what I'm looking for. 5x
       | SATA is good, but running raidz2 on that feels wrong. 6x or 8x
       | are good breakpoints for rolling your own NAS.
       | 
       | I was also looking forward to the Radxa Taco as that's the other
       | board that allows for good Ethernet I/O and more than 4 SATA, but
       | I ended up just getting an entire CPU/RAM/ATX Mobo instead.
       | 
       | Maybe there's something hacky you can do to split the SATA ports
       | in half to get up to 10 SATA at the cost of speed, but that
       | doesn't feel right either.
       | 
       | I feel like we are so close to dirt cheap yet high performance
       | NAS with these carrier boards. If only there were RPi compute
       | modules with ECC RAM.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | LeifCarrotson wrote:
         | All of these carrier expansion boards are just using
         | switches...The RPi CM4 just has one x1 PCIe lane exposed. If
         | that's "hacky", yes, you need a big x86 ATX motherboard with 24
         | or 20 lanes of PCIe.
         | 
         | You might find some boards using an ASMedia ASM1184e 1->4 PCIe
         | mux. There are riser boards available that just have this one
         | chip on them and let you plug in four PCIe SATA cards. Those
         | cards often use something like a JMicron JMB585 chip to convert
         | one PCIe lane into 5 SATA lanes. Boards like this embed, for
         | example, chained Realtek RTL8367 Ethernet switches to offer
         | more network ports.
         | 
         | It's true that when all your carrier board IO flows through a
         | single PCIe 3.0 lane, you do end up with a bottleneck. You're
         | going to be unable to saturate 10 SATA drives simultaneously.
         | However, your data source is probably not /dev/random, it's
         | more likely a single network client reading from a single SATA
         | drive. Remember, this isn't a high-performance server, it's a
         | low-power ARM SBC (now an MBC, once you stack a CM4 on a
         | carrier under a PCIe switch with some PCIe-SATA cards...)
        
           | bick_nyers wrote:
           | Gotcha, I didn't realize that there was only a single PCie x1
           | available, that puts things into perspective.
        
             | miniman1337 wrote:
             | you could take a look at some other SBCs like the upcoming
             | rockpi5 with rockchip rk3588, apparently it's very fast and
             | has lots of pcie to spare
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | zamalek wrote:
       | They suggest that it could be used for NVR. Does the Pi have the
       | on-board bandwidth to do 8x NVR?
        
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       (page generated 2022-05-04 23:02 UTC)