[HN Gopher] Diskomator - NVMe-TCP at your fingertips
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Diskomator - NVMe-TCP at your fingertips
Author : simjue
Score : 46 points
Date : 2023-11-15 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| anotherhue wrote:
| >I'd like to live to see a future where people build appliances
| like this for various purposes, not just this specific NVMe one.
| For example, a nice thing to have would be an appliance whose
| only job is to make all local displays available via Miracast. I
| hope this repository is inspiration enough for an interested
| soul, to get this off the ground.
|
| Very nice idea.
| mike_d wrote:
| I seem to recall an announcement from Western Digital(?) years
| ago about a line of hard drives with a direct ethernet interface.
| Does anyone remember the same or what might have come of it?
|
| The market is saturated with solutions for middle-boxes that make
| hard drives talk to networks, but nobody seems to be directly
| addressing the problem of we just want storage network
| accessible.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| Kioxia has a line of products (EM6) that has an embedded
| Marvell NVMeoF/{TCP,RDMA} controller and Foxconn has a chassis
| that can take them and expose them just directly on the
| network. neat stuff.
| gorkish wrote:
| Neat if you can stomach paying for the novelty. Let's see an
| open product that does the same for any old M.2 stick
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| SPDK + RDMA works just fine :)
| gorkish wrote:
| Yeah i know the software exists; it's finding ways to
| actually build systems from it that sucks. 2.5 gigabit
| ethernet has absolutely killed dead all momentum for
| getting faster interfaces in consumer hardware and SBCs
| unfortunately. I don't want to build a 2-drive OSD using
| a comparatively gargantuan microATX motherboard.
| toast0 wrote:
| > The market is saturated with solutions for middle-boxes that
| make hard drives talk to networks, but nobody seems to be
| directly addressing the problem of we just want storage network
| accessible.
|
| Most hard drives run a serial console on some of the jumpers.
| You can easily run PPP or SLIP over that. QED :P
| ronsor wrote:
| Nothing like those blazing fast 115kbps read/write speeds.
| csdvrx wrote:
| Tell me more, like a brand and model where I can do that!
|
| BTW if you already explored that, would you know how to alter
| the SLC/MLC ratio by any chance?
|
| Modern QLC drive often have a SLC area for buffering. With
| the right firmware tools, it should be possible to take a 4
| TB QLC drive and convert it to a 1 SLC drive to get more
| performance.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| An older reference for hacking hard disk drives:
| https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack
|
| There were some firmware bugs on Seagate Barracuda SATA
| drives that could be worked-around w/ serial console. I
| don't remember the specifics though.
|
| If you some search-engining on hard drive manufacturers and
| "serial console" you'll find indexed pages. (Presumably the
| really interesting stuff is buried deep down in forum
| posts, etc.) Just doing a couple quick searches got me some
| stuff.
| gorkish wrote:
| > The market is saturated with solutions for middle-boxes that
| make hard drives talk to networks
|
| It's my experience that these boxes try to do a hell of a lot
| more than just putting drives-on-network and that is why they
| all suck and are expensive.
|
| The NVMe-oF fabric devices out there all seem to command a
| ridiculous premium when the reality is they ought to be very
| simple and easily cost-optimized.
| matja wrote:
| There was a line of products called EtherDrive made by Coraid
| in the early 2000's that was basically a SATA to ATAoE bridge
| on the most basic devices, up to rack-mount solutions that used
| a Linux OS and Dell HBA to run vblade
| (https://github.com/OpenAoE/vblade) to expose a Linux MD array
| carved up using LVM2.
|
| ATAoE ("aoe" in the Linux kernel) is nice because it is very
| lightweight in both terms of code to implement it (~2-3kloc,
| basically just stuff an ATA packet in an ethernet frame), low
| network overhead, and ease to setup (no IP addresses).
| wkennington wrote:
| Seagate kinetic
|
| https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/hd...
| wmf wrote:
| I don't think the economics of this work because an Ethernet
| network is probably much more expensive than SAS and network
| configuration is more complex (you could make it zeroconf but
| that's also zero security).
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > Does anyone remember the same or what might have come of it?
|
| Nothing, because it makes each disk quite costly and by the
| 2014 nobody wanted costly _and slow_ HDDs.
|
| Check the Seagate offering up there it has 1Gbit interface. You
| can't even run the drive at full sequential read/write speed
| over it. And having a two 10Gbit ports on each drive would
| require having two 10Gbit switches, which by 2014 were still
| quite costly.
|
| EM6 solution[0,1] is neat but at least it both the quite packed
| both by the spec and the price but delivers a lot of IOPS and
| throughput.
|
| [0]
| https://www.ingrasys.com/assets/files/Datasheet_ES2000_20211...
| [1] https://www.servethehome.com/ethernet-ssds-hands-on-with-
| the...
| withinboredom wrote:
| I'm looking forward to Longhorn[1] taking advantage of this
| technology.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn
| EnigmaCurry wrote:
| How does this compare with iSCSI?
| withinboredom wrote:
| Like an iops improvement of 30%+ and latency improvement of
| 20%+[1], ish.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/134kqy3/iscsi_and_...
| gorkish wrote:
| This is awesome. Would be exciting if it can be extended to
| support NVMe-oF as well with RDMA via RoCEv2. A SBC running
| something like this with at least 2x10GbE and two M.2 slots and 2
| sata ports would be an absolute dream device for me.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I never really used Mac machines, but I always appreciated
| "target disk mode". This sounds similar, albeit over a network
| (which could simply be a straight-thru cable between Ethernet
| NICs on two machines).
|
| Edit: Yeah. I forgot about actually saying what "target disk mode
| was". There's a child post that mentions it, so I'll refrain. I
| will say that I saw it used in imaging computers in a college
| computer lab setting back in the early 2000's. I definitely
| wished my PCs could've done it. It looked like a very handy
| feature. Presumably it would make fixing OS boot issues easier,
| as well as just harvesting files off a machine that was otherwise
| not operating properly due to OS issues.
| metadat wrote:
| Diskomater appears to be an open source, platform agnostic
| version of this underlying technology!
|
| In case, like me, "Target Disk Mode" is not something you're
| familiar with:
|
| > People also ask What is the target disk mode? If you have two
| Mac computers with USB, USB-C or Thunderbolt ports, you can
| connect them so that one of them appears as an external hard
| disk on the other. This is called target disk mode. Note: If
| either of the computers has macOS 11 or later installed, you
| must connect the two computers using a Thunderbolt cable.
|
| Sidenote: Thunderbolt cables are special USB-C cables, i.e. the
| wire between your Mac and the USB-C power brick.
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