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Comment by paranoidrobot | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking for something like this, but cheaper and for 3.5" drives. USD$250, plus shipping to Australia puts that just too high for what it offers.

I own Synology NASs, but adding an expander for that is expensive. (AUD$800)

The ODroid-HC4 looks promising, but their 'toaster' case design for it is awful, leaving the drives exposed and unable to put two atop each other.

Ideally what I'd like is:

- 1-2x 3.5" SATA drives

- Gbit NIC

- Enough grunt to run some kind of clustered filesystem (gluster, ceph, whatever)

The idea being that I could start a cluster with say 3x of these devices, and then as my storage needs grow - add more.

They don't need to have stellar IO, but enough to keep up with plex.

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Is this really that expensive? I bought a 4-bay Netgear NAS (without drives) back in 2013 or so for around $375. I still use it today, but its performance is pretty bad (it's a single-core ARMv5TE with 256MB -- yes, MB -- of RAM), and I've had to deal with a no-longer-supported proprietary OS[0] based on Debian squeeze (unsupported since 2016).

I see a Synology 5-bay NAS on Amazon for around $700. The PiBox 5 plus an 8GB CM4 w/32GB eMMC runs less than $350. Even though I'd expect the performance of the PiBox to be less than that of a Synology NAS, I will gladly pay half price for something decent that runs an OS that I can update essentially forever and manage how I see fit.

[0] Luckily I've managed to build and flash a modern kernel and install Debian buster on it, since support for its hardware has been upstreamed, but I imagine this is the exception, not the rule.

I bought a rockpro64 and a NAS case with space for 4 drives, I added a 4xSATA PCIe card. Right now it's a 4x4TB ZFS setup that has been running as my own home storage for over a year continuously. Very happy with it.

What kind oft write speeds do you get on zfs?

I also have a rockpro64 with two 8tb WD red pro and in subvolumes with encryption i only get 70MB and in non encrypted 110MB. I already switched from aes256-gcm (the default) to aes256-ccm, since that is less taxing ob the CPU.

I Start to get the feeling that zfs arm is not yet optimised enough.

`cryptsetup benchmark`

shows me ~400-500 MiB/s (per core) for aes-xts-256 on slower rk3566

I guess it will be similar for gcm

Are you running zfs native encryption and zfs mirror/RAID or luks + mdadm with zfs in top?

No, just showing output from a tool that uses kernel based HW accelerated primitives on the platform.

how are you measuring it?

Do you have a link or model for the NAS case?

this is the case: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00J353KH8/ - had to modify it a bit to fit the rockpro at the bottom, use an ethernet extension to connect the cable from the back and a hacky switch to turn it on. But it works now and it's pretty stable.

After further poking around, I see that if one ponies up one's email and follows the (surprisingly dark-patterned) [0] "Sign Up & Customize" button [1], one can see the whole catalogue of planned PiBox hardware. It looks like you'd want the currently-unreleased "Box 2" -- assuming you could swallow the presumably still unpalatable shipping charges.

[0] OK, I get that these guys want to gauge interest as precisely as possible, given the frightening prospect of being a hardware startup during a chip shortage and/or burgeoning logistics apocalypse, but it's still a real eye-roller. Especially given how, like, cool this project otherwise seems.

[1] https://pibox.io/prefs <- note that without having already signed up, this'll bounce you to the homepage

Yeah I saw their 3.5" variant that's coming soon, but assuming it's prices only slightly higher than the 2.5" variant (keeping in mind it'd need a different power supply setup) it's still too expensive IMO. It's edging into the price range of other commercially available NASs for less performance.

Fair enough. I figure one of the things that I'm paying for is a non-wack firmware/OS in dedicated NAS hardware; it's less about performance for me (I could just use an old computer!) and more about power usage, form factor, and supporting general-purpose-computing-that-just-happens-to-be-running-a-NAS.

I think it's a little unfair to call this a dark pattern. There's no point in selecting product options if you're not going to give them your email (since nothing is actually available yet), and I think "Sign Up & Customize" is a pretty clear description of what's happening.

It's pretty clear (to me, at least) that they're trying to see what people want (and even helpfully give the expected price points for the various options) in order to decide what order to design and build things, and I'm more than happy to help give that information, as well as give them my email address so they can tell me when the thing I want is going to be available.

I guess I just don't see what your objection is to their flow. The only improvement I could see would be waiting to ask for an email address until the end instead of the beginning, but I don't see that as being all that huge. And honestly I see that as sorta worse: it feels dark-patterny to get people to engage with you (in this case, by putting the various hardware option selections first), and then after they've invested the time, require an email address to make that time worthwhile.

>I guess I just don't see what your objection is to their flow

...they're asking for my email in order to let me see the prices. Why do they need my email in order to let me see the prices? Answer: they don't. So, uh, why are they asking for it? I find this bonkers. There are all kinds of Hackers on this site; I consider myself a Computer subtype, but I suppose from the perspective of the Growth Hacker, this isn't strange at all.

>And honestly I see that as sorta worse: it feels dark-patterny to get people to engage with you (in this case, by putting the various hardware option selections first), and then after they've invested the time, require an email address to make that time worthwhile

Question, would you engage in business with a physical store that made you provide ID (or even just an email) before letting you see how much things cost? Personally I go to the liquor store, select some liquor based on price and whimsy, and then I show them my ID to complete the flow. Placing roadblocks in the path of that flow -- I can't see the price without ID, and I can't just whimsically browse the shelves if I have to signal my intent to be there by digging out my ID before I enter -- seems like a bad idea.

If you block scripts, the redirect doesn't happen. Very weird.

There was Helios64 but unfortunately they went out of business. I have the predecessor system Helios4 and absolutely love it.

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