Introducing the Nextcloud Box
nextcloud.com
nextcloud.com
"Have never done it before" would not be a description I would apply to Western Digital regarding hardware products.
The website admits however, that this is more of a "reference device, meant to inspire and invite anyone to build their own", so I would not expect the most rugged quality. In any case, as you need to bring your own Raspberry Pi, it seems to be more of a product for tinkerers than for enterprise-strength reliability.
1. Each cable has a bend radius recommended by the supplier. If this bend radius is exceeded (too small) then it is very unlikely that the cabling will function properly electrically, especially for high speed communications. Cross-talk, dropped packets, etc. If anything the supplier is off the hook for meeting their spec since it wasn't installed correctly.
2. The plastic insulation will take this for a while but two things happen to polymers with a constant stress on them.
2.a They suffer stress relaxation via creep. The long linked molecules will reach a new alignment over time. They will no longer be in their plastic range and settle in a new configuration. This could result in more crosstalk or even a complete insulation failure as a function of time.
2.b Flexible plastics typically slowly lose plasticity over time due to the breakdown of the plasticizer that made them flexible. (That nice new cable smell) Most cables have PVC made flexible due to these additives. If this box is warm due to the heat from the drive and pi, then it's entirely likely that the cable could further degrade under the constant strain and creep and fail. Causing not only thinning but brittle breaking of the jacket. It doesn't have to be visible breaking for it to stop working electrically.
Basically you can't trust your wire anymore. It could work forever. It could fail randomly. It could just cause communication errors that are hard to trace.
As for the box, they just used too much plastic and pushed the thing through the machine too fast without cooling. But then again, I am not an ultra expert on injection molding. It's an art. My recommendation would be "Have a sit down with your molder, these faults do not need to be."
I'm sure you might be right but it unless I'm missing something I'm not sure any of your points can be entirely proven until you know who sources the parts and what extreme(s) they can handle, no?
Considering the cables are made by the same company as the box itself (WDLabs) and that we've sold almost 1000 boxes and haven't had a single person tell us the cables were problematic and considering I've personally put together a dozen boxes and taken them apart and together again many times and still encountered no issues I think I can safely say: it is just fine.
Nobody could source cables with a right angle bend in them?
We’re working on improvements to the box and the bends of the cables are something we take into account. Also the power cable sticking out of the back.
As written elsewhere, it’s a reference device, which was then also used by other open source projects like OSMC: https://osmc.tv/2016/08/announcing-the-osmc-pidrive/
So being a fully open source project we are happy about any contributions, especially if you are knowledgeable in that field. In any case I will forward your recommendations to the team, so thanks a lot already! (I’m sure they also thought about these things so I’ll let you know.) :)
All 100% open source at https://github.com/nextcloud – and any contributions are very welcome! :)
Currently testing out an OrangePi Plus 2E strapped to a touchscreen to replace the all in ones we use for another product, with good results thus far.
Firstly, the cable layout is frustrating, and requires bending the cables in such away that makes closing the case a pain.
Secondly, the software is very unimpressive, I had the system just stop responding several times, the windows client is rather underwhelming as well.
I just see no real advantages to say combining my own raspberry pi with a WD passport.
Other than the plastic box.
It's worded weird, but I assumed the "compute board" is the PI.
The OS is put together by Canonical, until now it was based on Ubuntu 16.04 and they'll soon update it to Snappy Ubuntu Core so you get a fully 0-maintenance solution.
A normal external hard drive risks not working with a Pi. This 2.5" USB drive is optimized for low power usage, esp at startup and comes with a cable and charger which powers both the drive and Pi from a single cable.
Obviously, if you are looking for an external USB drive for your computer, this is all not relevant. But if you want to use it with a Pi or a similar board, this kit is far superior.
However, if you look at the bottom it states that this case is a reference design, much like the Google phones, intended to be a platform upon which others can build new products.
USB performance on Pi is garbage, and you're sharing your storage I/O with the network I/O since they're both USB prehiperals.
This is a terrible idea.
Perhaps in the next revision they'll base it around something better suited, such as the ESPRESSOBin:
http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/09/23/marvell-espressobin-b...
> ESPRESSOBin will be launched on Kickstarter in the next few days.
sigh
I have high hopes for it Globalscale made great stuff with the Sheevaplug and Dreamplug.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/874883570/marvell-espre...
For Nextcloud itself people like to of course hate about it being in PHP just for the sake of it. But the simple fact is that it enables a lot of people to run it. And if we want a viable alternative, then that is paramount.
PHP is fine, everyone loves to hate on it but it makes the world turn.
* Data on my own box.
* Remote access via the DS Cloud app on devices, or the web app.
* RAID with an external backup drive.
With Nextcloud, it looks like I get:
* Data stored where ever I like, including my Synology NAS(?).
* Some kind of remote access, and it's stored on the NextCloud(?).
* On my own for backups, no RAID.
* No idea on pricing.
If it's dirt cheap, I guess maybe a Nextcloud is an option. But if it begins to approach the price of Synology's least expensive offers I fail to see the value.
It also will probably be slower than most synology solutions and more manual work - we'd like to improve that of course but that means we need help as this is a community effort, not a commercial thing.
I hope there is more in the future to come in this area to bring the notion of home owned appliances instead of the cloud. Specially with IoT around the corner - those devices should communicate to a home server like this only.
NAS boxes are relatively popular, and the major vendors are heavily leaning on making them the "all-in-one" home/soho servers as demonstrated by the wide range of applications available to them:
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/NEW-orange-pi-plus-...
We've made the box hardware-compatible with the oDroid C2 so people have an upgrade path - I understand Linux 4.10 will have out of the box oDroid C2 support so it shouldn't be too much after that that Canonical's Ubuntu Core will support it, too, and users can pick one up if they like.
ZFS is both a file system and a block layer. You would use RAID + ext4 or ZFS. The block layer parts of ZFS are comparable to RAID and are superior in many ways, including the most important: checksums.
I'm not entirely sure I see the value proposition here.
It's definitely not an all-in-one small office solution, there's no email app.
You can run that together with a Dovecot for example. It integrates nicely with Nextcloud Contacts for autocompletion and Files for attachments. Testing and contributions are very much welcome! :)
(Disclaimer: I used to be Design Lead at ownCloud and moved to Nextcloud.)
There is a post that describes their experience of selecting and implementing with Ubuntu Core for this box, at https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/09/29/the-making-of-the-nex...
Sorry but what's cloudy about this? No high-availability, no redundancy. I guess Nextserver just isn't as marketable.
All drives fail. Any drive can fail at the worst time. You must have back ups, and you must test your back ups.
I always wonder why this never have worked out. Most of today's Internet users aren't even running on 100Mbps. Why are we moving to all cloud? Why No physical box in between? For example Time Capsule that backups to iCloud.
owncloud is nothing but horrible, full of bugs and zero innovation when it comes to file sharing.
But I'm hopelessly biassed, working for Nextcloud, so please check github for yourself when you pick a solution for your data - at least look at the pulse over the last week or month before you pick a solution. If you don't know it, here is ours: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pulse it shows you the activity in the project. For comparison, this is bad: https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/pulse
Again, I'm biassed, so make your own conclusion, don't rely on mine. I'm just pointing the way.
We’re focusing a lot more on stability and innovation, and if you look at the Github statistics, you’ll see that our activity surpasses ownCloud’s by a magnitude.
What about a warning stating that you cannot keep your important stuff here unless you want to loose them in a undetermined moment in the future?
Plus, there's only so much you can back up to the cloud. I'd back up 125GB of personal pictures, but not 1.25TB of ripped Bluray media.
RAID is huge defense for keeping "inevitable disk failure" from turning into "massive data loss."
Do you, personally, test backup and restore of ALL of your data that you care about at acceptable loss intervals? Are you sure?
And if your acceptable loss interval is "zero," then redundant synchronous storage across devices in one form or another is all there is.
Backup is a total real-world solution to data loss like antivirus is a total real-world solution to malware and infosec.
My post was maybe to strictly worded, RAID is nice and helpful, but it was responding to a claim that it is irresponsible to advertise a non-RAID device for important data, which is IMHO irresponsible itself, because it suggests that's all you recommend relying on.
No it doesn't. Defense in depth is a thing.
having only one of the two solutions will expose you to some risks
I agree with some others here that backups are more important and this would have priority from my pov. Sadly nobody has built a complete backup app for Nextcloud yet.