Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS

What do you think about Synology only allowing their rebranded Toshiba drives to work in their NAS? That's a deal breaker for me.

EDIT: Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596179

You are right that Synology (or an equivalent appliance) is often best. It's more complicated for geeks and data hoarders once we've been using a Synology for a while.

When people go down the Synology path they are often running apps and doing more than providing a big pool of storage. I'm finding that my needs have changed towards my NAS being only a pool of storage on my local network. It is there as the first tier of backups to speed up disaster recovery. I feel confident that I could move to a more DIY NAS solution because it would only be used for NAS storage.

It's not ideal, but an old desktop is now much better for my app needs, including Plex. Ideally, I'd have a single app box with the power consumption of 4-5 Raspberry Pi. I have only found a couple of ARM server solutions which are fairly old and ARM doesn't have standard sockets etc. because the focus seems to be on SoC instead of replicating what I'm used to with PCs and ATX mobos.

What happens when the Sinology dies? Do I have to buy another Synology to mount my array again? Does it have to be the same model, or family of models?

And I use pi's as interchangeable/swappable processors for a variety of different tasks. Its only casing which people tend to miss with pi's which can be addressed with 3d printing.

My Synology has been anything but realiable in the past month or so. I've twice had to hard reboot it because it stops working. I think it stops writing all data, which means that even something as simepl as "echo "" > out" will hang forever. Can't even turn it off because DSM stops responding and "sudo reboot" hangs.

I have no idea whether it's a disk going bad, the file system going bad or the entire device going bad. It did give a warning that an I/O command timed out on one of the disks, but I've yet to get a S.M.A.R.T. extended test completed on the disk.

I agonized about this for years. I wanted a proper server, not something embedded or a Pi with a rat's nest of cables, that would still fit in a credenza in the living room.

Ended up getting an HP MicroServer Gen8 and absolutely love it. Same cube design as the DS918+, but with proper iLO (remote media, etc.), lots of boot options, and very stoutly built. It feels like a real HP DL300-series server (the Gen9 does not IMHO). I bought it as it was being discontinued.

It's running VMware ESXi with FreeNAS on top of that, with an LSI SAS card connected to the drive bays, then hardware-pass-through'ed to the FreeNAS VM. I've got the home's DNS server, Pi-hole, Unifi controller, test VMs, etc. happily virtualized alongside FreeNAS. 16GB RAM total, with 8GB dedicated to FreeNAS. Boot is off a microSD card (on the motherboard, naturally) and VM datastore is on an SSD connected where the optical drive would go.

I know I'm violating several recommendations here (low RAM, virtualized FreeNAS, SAS card passed through, etc. etc.) but it does indeed work, very well in fact. 2+ years of serving the home. With the Gen8, HP built almost the perfect home server for tech-oriented types... pity they cost-reduced its successor.

That's quite a markup you're experiencing. A conversion based on US prices makes it seem like you should be able to get that stuff for a little more than sixty Euros. If you can get it at all: availability is tough right now all over, I assume.

Is that price difference about shipping costs or VAT or what?

> GK3V mini pc

That is a very cool looking thing, but targeting a different use case, I would think.

The kits are always going to be marked up—and even more so today, since it's so hard to find individual Pis in stock anywhere.

Here in the US, the only way for many people to get a Pi 4 is in a kit that's at least $100 (sometimes scalped and marked up to $150-200 on Amazon or eBay). Until about 3 months ago, though, I could reliably find a model I wanted from Micro Center or one of the official Pi online resellers for $35-75 (list price).

I'd be interested if anyone can comment on commercial bulk procurement of Pis. Any idea what the volume discounts are? And also would be interesting to know what the supply has been like for the past year(s) for commercial customers.

I've heard anecdotally that most Pis sold are used in industry, so wouldn't be surprised if they're being prioritized.

I’ve found this to be the case for most of the time Raspberry Pis have been around. The cost proposition has always relied on using other components people have “lying around”, like the power adapter, SD card, etc. However as the power quality requirements have gone up for each Pi release, old AC adapters can’t be used anymore, SD cards need to be better quality to handle the writes, and you want a case for it, etc. From my perspective you’ve always been looking at close to $100 to get everything you need for it to be useful.

I was thinking of going the other way, from synology to TrueNas Scale since is Linux based.

Are you suggesting that that’s a fool’s errand and I shouldn’t do that?

I have a Raspberry Pi running Wireguard that's pretty reliable - but it's really just running Wireguard.

You're probably using an unreliable power supply. Use something official, and put any USB peripherals on a separately powered hub.

I have a Pi 4 that's been rock stable, running both Hypriot w/ Docker containers, and recently, TalosOS w/ full k8s. Single-node k8s on a Pi is horrendously slow during changes, if you're wondering, but it's fast enough once everything is stable. I have it running JupyterLab right now. Don't really notice a difference in speed once the kernel launches for tinkering-level scripts.

Mine is powered via PoE FWIW.

I've been running a pi at home for more than a half a year now. It's running multiple web services, like my personal blog https://habet.dev/blog nextcloud, wireguard, pihole and more.

Lately I started writing blog posts detailing the set up: https://habet.dev/self-hosting-and-securing-web-services-out...

I haven't had any issues with it!

I've been wanting to test out one of Solid Run's boards, but haven't had the opportunity. Have you done any benchmarking to see how much throughput you actually get? I would hope it's a lot more than the Pi, but can't know until it's thoroughly tested!

One thing to note: the Honeycomb LX2 is listed at $750 :)

At $750 without memory, storage, or case and only offering a x8 PCIe 3.0 slot it seems to lose the advantage of being cheap while still being worse than a non-ARM64 box in terms of interfaces (and likely performance).

What do you need the pi for? The size? Intel NUC is substantially more powerful and after power bank, SD, case etc you end up paying about the same

I documented everything in excruciating detail in this GitHub issue [1] — but in summary it was RAID5 created by mdadm (to replicate what the Drivestor 4 Pro does via ADM—it doesn't have ZFS as an option), and bcache set up on top of that with an EXT4 filesystem.

[1] https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss...