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Comment by villgax | Hacker News Reader

I'd kill for a 2 bay stable RPi NAS design which also includes physical buttons to power down the drives and works with a simple UPS using 20Ah USB power banks

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The problem with RPi is that you would be doing SATA over USB 3.0. It will work, but it's not great.

Other SoC typically have just one native SATA link (like A20). SoCs with better connectivity exist - that's what ends up in consumer NAS products after all - but SBCs are sparse and expensive (e.g. MachiattoBIN).

You could go for a CM module and do your own expansion board with a SATA controller on PCIe but then you may run up against the x1 bandwidth (if it's PCIe 2.0 then probably fine for two drives).

ROCKPro64 has a x4 PCIe slot you could use with an HBA card I guess. But at this point I'd probably go for a Celeron ITX board.

Some time ago I would suggest just getting a second-hand NAS and running Debian on it (like QNAP TS-219P) but with Debian 11 dropping support it is less appealing.

Quartz64 has native SATA. Other similar rockchip 35xx SoC based SBCs may have up to 3x native SATA port options. So the future is slightly brighter. Someone will probably make 2x - 3x SATA board at the expense of USB 3 port, or use some external PCIe<->SATA controller to add even more. There may even be support for ECC DRAM.

https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/12/16/rockchip-rk3566-and-...

I think you are describing Odroid HC

Damn, I didn't know they came out with that toaster!!

Thanks!

How is the SW support, can you run a mainstream distribution like Ubuntu and get timely security updates for some years into the future without compromising on the device peripheral support?

edit - https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-c4/software sounds like you're going to be running their fork of Ubuntu or Android without the abovementioned guarantees for updates

Every time you see a SoC just check if Armbian supports it. This is the case here https://www.armbian.com/odroid-hc4/, and if there is Armbian for it you can just use the Armbian sources to build the kernel for any other distro with ARM support. Including Archlinux ARM, NixOS and so on. Once you know enough about u-boot it's very easy to run any distro provided you have a kernel for it.

Thanks.

But I don't want to build kernels as part of normal operation once it's set up, I want the device to last its expected useful lifetime with just periodic apt updates. This means a LTS distro that ships kernels for the device. Otherwise the setup is fail-open security wise, depending on my constant active tinkering.

Maybe Odroid happen to be exceptionally good and the vendor provided Ubuntu fork is good enough for this, but I don't see an easy way to check their track record over a longer timespan and for devices that are several generations behind their latest and greatest.

I would go for a Rock64pro with NASCase: https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-metal-desktop-nas-casin...

Just look on the internet for NAS and pine64.

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