Kobol Team Is Pulling the Plug from “Helios64 Open Source NAS”

Especially that they are open with reasons why, what they feel they could have done better, and releasing blueprints allowing others to pick up.

No doubt 2020/2021 must have been the most challenging years in decades for an indie team to launch a new hardware project like this.

I was looking quite seriously at the Kobol64 last year; the only thing that eventually made me not preorder was realizing the RAM would not be sufficient for my purposes (ZFS-backed Glusterfs nodes).

One of the huge challenges with building niche, enthusiast hardware is that you have fewer resources than a bigger company, yet enthusiast customers tend to be far more demanding than normal. The Helios products look fantastic, but even in this HN thread you can see potential customers explaining why they wanted more out of the product (Mostly RAM). I have a feeling their fate would have been a lot of people agreeing it was a cool product but then going off and buying something else after doing some research.

ARM boards are hard right now because we’re not quite to the point of powerful, high-RAM systems being affordable, so most things are a compromise. In retrospect, I wish they would have applied their obviously fantastic product engineering skills to building an awesome NAS case first that accepted a standard Mini-ITX board. From there, they could have partnered with a Nano-ITX board vendor to offer a smaller V2, then as they picked up momentum they could branch into the custom all-in-one solution. Trying to jump straight to a full custom product from top to bottom is extremely hard, to say the least.

That being said, Kobos never delivered quality hardware. My Helios4 died, likely the PSU, early Helios64 needed a botch job for their LAN Ports to work correctly and they never delivered on the ECC RAM needed for a NAS. Performance on the Helios4 was also absolutely crappy, never being able to deliver gigabit speeds over the LAN Port. I wish them all the best though, my personal hardware is going to be x86 for the foreseeable future unless ARM makes MAJOR strides in terms of linux compatibility

The cynic in my says another company will probably pop up shortly with a new Icarus128 NAS board.

And supply chain disruptions have been so extremely painful in the past year, why doesn't the industry do this? It seems like if you could provide guarantees about interchangeability, that translate to guarantees about availability, people would be willing to pay a premium.

Rather than hoping or praying things will change ( it wont ), I do appreciate their honest take on the issue.

What's the smallest ECC NAS board on the market right now?

I ended up getting the Helios64 as it fitted both my needs pretty well and got to support an amazing project - hopefully the community can live on and help each other out!

Thank you Kobol team and thank you for the openness and transparency the whole time.