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Comment by NickHoff | Hacker News Reader

I'm considering buying a NUC, attaching a big hard drive, and running syncthing on it. Good idea?

Some NUC models cannot house 2.5" SATA drives. For those that do, heat dissipation is an issue for 7200RPM drives. Plus max capacity of internal 2.5" hard drives is only 2TB, and depending on your use case it might or might not be sufficient.

Your use case does not seem very computation-depending. Maybe a cheaper Raspberry Pi-based solution will also work.

If they cannot house 2.5" what size can they house then? Or did you mean 3.5"?

M.2 SSDs

Oh wow. I must keep up with the times then!

Those are PCI-e so they're substantially faster than their S-ATA equivalent.

Wow, chrisper isn't the only one who hasn't been paying attention. It's news to me too. These slot right into the bus, just like a hardcard! Everything old is new again.

No he meant 2.5"

Those models only have the "MacBook pro" "stick ssd" aka M2 SSD, which has a smaller form factor.

Thanks for the advice. Yeah, a NUC would be way overpowered most of the time. A R-Pi and NFS probably solves 90% of my use case.

The RPi, even the 3, isn't a great choice for networked storage, since the NIC is running over the USB bus. A Beaglebone Black[1] would be similar but have better hardware for the job.

1: http://beagleboard.org/black

My understanding is that the Beaglebone Black is also... opener. Or at least it seems like the Beaglebone Black is supported by more operating systems. If, for example, you wanted to run OpenBSD or even Minix 3, BBB is the system for you.

I have a Beaglebone Black with a WD USB 2 portable HDD attached to it. I get only around 5 MB/s while copying (from Beagle to PC) a ~500 MB file over 5 GHz wifi. Not sure if this is because of USB 2.0 though.

PCEngines boxes would be pretty good for this too http://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

USB drives and ethernet share the same bus on RPi so NAS performance is not great.

A chromebox with a new seabios rom (so it can run a normal Linux distro) would be a decent compromise between those two extremes.

I have an Asus chromebox doing this, very happy with it.

> Plus max capacity of internal 2.5" hard drives is only 2TB

That's the maximum capacity of a 2.5" 9mm tall drive. You can buy Seagate 4TB & 5TB drives in 2.5" which are 15mm tall. [0] [1]

[0] https://mtekk.us/archives/reviews/hardware/seagate-4tb-expan...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Barracuda-2-5-Inch-Internal-S...

I did this with a square NUC. You need to remove the drive bracket and rely on a bit of tape instead. It will fit but I used the M2 slot to do cache for the big drive rather than have slow storage.

15mm drives are not really suitable for internal installation due to limited height in most NUCs.

It might be cheaper to get a mini-ITX build instead. It is larger than the NUC form-factor, but allows for much more expansion if you ever feel like it.

I just did a build, and was considering the NUC, but it was prohibitively costlier for not a lot of improvement, other than the form factor.

I have never run syncthing but NUCs are a really nice product, sturdy and easily concealed (you can just screw them under a desk for example). Don't forget to buy memory and a hard drive for your unit though :) It doesn't come with any.

Since most NUCs don't take 3.5" HDs, I assume you mean attaching via USB3?

You should be able to get a Thin Terminal device for about $100US with USB3.0 and gigabit ethernet and/or wifi. With a little shopping, you may even be able to get one with a low profile PCIe slot for similar money. A few examples of such machines are the HP T5740, t520 or t620. Dell/Wyse also should have acceptable options.

Choosing a Thin terminal should cost far less than a NUC while being much more capable than a raspberry pi for not much more money (a raspberry pi 3 still needs a uSD card, a case, and an unusually powerful USB PSU).

Most (many?) nuc users use the mini-pci flash storage devices. My NUCs (I have 3 of the skylake ones with 32G of ram) have 250G Samsung SSDs and those suckers just scream.

I setup freebsd on mine and have the internal nvmex4 ssd's as caches and external usb3 jbod towers holding the spinning rust.

Its nice, though the performance of usb3 is... less than optimal the fact that I can saturate gigabit ethernet means I don't care too much. Local compiles are crazy fast though.

That sounds like a pretty nice setup. I'm running a small (3 node hopefully 5 node in a few months) kubernetes cluster to dogfood things for my own home use. What do you run, some sort of a NAS with them?

Yep, I just run nfsv3 and samba4 on it to share things out to my internal network.

Its plenty fast for all my needs, though nfs over wifi is... slow in general its fast enough to not care a whole lot. I have a few bhyve linux vm's running that just go straight to the ssd's so they're silly fast with like 3g/s read speed or whatever. Its more than enough for all my home needs.

Looking to do something similar and was worried about compatibility for the disk enclosure. Mind sharing which one you went with that works with freebsd?

I use a skylake nuc for my lab server. Spins up VMs just fine although you have to run Fedora (vs RHEL/Centos) for full hardware support as some drivers are only in the 4.x kernel.

I have the impression that a cheap desktop (pentium?) PC is in fact cheaper and can house lots of 3.5" drives. Depends on how much space you have and how much storage you need.

A used ThinkPad T420 sells for about $200,has full driver support and will do anything you're looking for.

Not to mention a built-in console and battery backup. That said, the NUC form-factor is nice if hiding it is important.

Laptops run 24/7 are (I would think) more likely than desktops to develop heat and wear related hardware faults, and I'd consider anything with a Lithium Ion battery plugged into power all the time in (presumably) a closet or other out-of-the-way place to be a fire hazard (see also: the aforementioned thermal issues, which would aggravate any issues with the battery)

I don't see why an original battery would be a fire hazard.

But many laptops will run without a battery just fine.

Yeah, but then no "built-in battery backup", which is part of claimed benefit of buying a used $200 laptop over rooting a $150 chromebox or $200-300 cheap PC.

You can run the laptop without a battery in it if you're worried about a fire.

The Asus VIVO PC line is physically larger, but has some models with space for a 3.5" hard drive, and is still not terribly large.

They work great: excellent NIC performance, reliable (2 years 24*7), good driver support on ubuntu and fedora.

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