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Comment by smashed | Hacker News Reader

This is a cool project and I am happy to see interest in this sort of thing.

Too bad though that general purpose SBC's kind of suck for NAS/Storage though. Both the rpi4 and orange pi zero mentioned in the project lack any kind of SATA port and relies on usb to sata.

The best project I saw was the Helios4/Helios64 (https://kobol.io/), but sadly, they folded in 2021. Is there anything even remotely similar around?

Right now I am still using intel-based mini-pc's for diy NAS storage as they simply work better.

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Not ARM, but there's the Odroid H3 and H3+.

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3/

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3-plus/

Yeah, these seem pretty great for a small NAS, especially with a simple mirrored ZFS setup.

I'd love to have something similar with ECC RAM.

Expensive, but the FAQ says it supports ECC:

https://morefine.com/products/morefine-s500-mini-pc

And it has 2 NVME slots.

At that point just get normal MiniITX board and case

ITX cases are often 10 liters or more, and the smallest ones are still a few liters. Some of those embedded boards can have cases of a liter or less.

...and you're building a NAS with a minimum of 2 3.5 inch disks

There’s a hundred ways to gate-keep what a NAS is. My personal minimum is redundant power supplies, 10GbE, and ECC memory, but I realize that some opt for less. In the end it doesn’t have to be anything other than storage attached to a network.

My “NAS” is a “slim” Intel NUC 8 with a 3D-printed “riser” that allows it to fit a 4TB (15mm) 2.5” HDD. No redundancy of course, but otherwise it’s superior to a legit NAS or Pi NAS in every way.

I just bought a NUC 8! Do you have an STL anywhere that I could use?

I used this one, which fits a 15mm drive, but it’s tight:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5441566

There’s also this one that I did not try, which might fit 15mm drives a little better:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5140192

Radxa has the Taco hat for the RasPi CM4, with 5 SATA slots, an M.2 Slot and 2.5GbE!

https://wiki.radxa.com/Taco

There is such a thing as good enough. For instance, are you trying to watch a two hour movie in five minutes, or two hours?

For most things, particularly video streaming, 100 Mbps is more than enough. If you want faster, a Pi 4 can saturate gigabit with mirrored storage on USB. You don't need dedicated SATA ports to do that.

I've tried to use a pi as a cloud storage but I just couldn't find a usable setup. SFTP mounts are unreliable and slow, NFS is insecure so can't be exposed over the internet, Nextcloud had the best UI but run like a dog on the pi 4.

I eventually built a full x86 desktop but found nextcloud is slow with any amount of processing power. Put 20k photos in a directory and it just stops functioning.

Gave up and went with Google Drive.

20k files in one directory could hit filesystems hard in general - not only a PHP app on top of that

They don’t really present any alternatives. I wouldn’t care if internally it split it in to multiple directories and presented it as one in the UI.

Performance is important but my main problem is reliability of the usb to SATA controllers.

In practice you often get weird timeout issues and unintelligible errors in kernel logs, hard resets, drives disconnecting or worst, data corruption. It's also always difficult to tell if it is a failing drive, or if it's a controller bug, or power supply issue.

Does SMART work over usb? If not how are you alerted of drive problem?

This is another thing that really depends on the USB to SATA controller you use.

Some are OK, some are great, and some are garbage before they make it to a warehouse shelf.

It depends on the USB-SATA adapter. Yes, I get some SMART data using smartctl. I also get alerted if a pending write takes longer than a few ticks, which would indicate issues.

The primary issue with USB-SATA is power. Give a good USB-SATA adapter, the drive, and the host computer good power, and you'll see excellent reliability.

My 1U Raspberry Pi server with two mirrored spinning rust disks on USB-SATA has been up continuously since September and has been busy with running SearXNG, DNS, email, web (including dynamic sites), MySQL, and so on, while also being used to compile while heavily going in to swap.

In other words, it has been doing non-stop disk I/O since September without an issue.

This is because everything in the machine has excellent power :)

You get that with cheap PCIe SATA ones too, gotta watch out. I eventually traced my NAS problems to that, shitty controller (I had 4 ports off mobo + 2 extra off controller)

There is Argon Eon which gets good reviews, but I haven't decided to try it yet. A bit more expensive than this diy - 180 EUR [0]. It has space for 2x 2.5 inch and 2x 3.5 inch disks. If someone has it, I would be curious to know how good it is.

[0] https://www.en.galagomarket.com//item/display/3130/10443_ohi...

> Is there anything even remotely similar around?

There is GnuBee [1] with two models for 2.5" drives [2] and 3.5" drives [3].

1.: http://gnubee.org/

2.: https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1

3.: https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-2

I have this thing. It's just about useless imo. The CPU is so low power that it maxes out doing a file transfer making it incredibly slow. It's maybe neat if you want to tinker with open source hardware.

Also weird that they acknowledge that the GNU foundation asked them to change the name yet they seemingly won't ever do that.

I helped a friend to create home storage with two units (redudancy) of gnubee PC1 (2.5" drives), and setup is ultra useful, fast, low power and reliable (contrary to sibling comments ;) -> highly recommend it.

Usage (few years of happy usage):

* openwrt custom build with patches

* FDE for all drives using linux cryptsetup, including custom patches for cryptoengine (critical)

* big (read x TB) repos served by locally (on gnubee) run syncthing

* big files served for local media devices over ksmbd, (read 4k streams ;)

* drives in raid1 (linux mdraid)

ultra low power for 24/7, with 90% of energy budget for drives.

Highly recommended! But yes, I agree that it required tinkering, skills and time to set up.

ODROID-HC4 (toaster), ODROID-HC4-P KIT (horizontal drives in enclosure)

There is also the odroid hc4. It only has two slots, but the argument is, for the price you may as well expand by getting multiple of them.

it seems like none of the consumer-level ARM chips expose enough PCIe lanes to do anything interesting, no SATA controllers or 10Gb+ ethernet

Orange Pi 5 (rk3588 based) has m.2 pcie 2.0. I think maybe only a lane?

Yep, you can get an m2 to SATA breakout board pretty cheap.

If you pickup a Rock 5b (rk3588 as well) you will get 2.5g ethernet too.

There's a lot of different m.2 sockets. This m.2 has a PCIe not a SATA connection. You'd need not a breakout board, but an actual SATA adapter with a PCIe <-> SATA chip on it. Still cheap, not a big barrier, but the terminology of "breakout board" is quite incorrect.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OrangePI/comments/zm3sms/does_the_o...

RK3568 / RK3588 have 3 SATA controllers and for example the Rock Pi 3A seems to have the SATA routed to the bottom m.2 connector, as well as the possibility to switch the USB3 port over to SATA

https://linuxgizmos.com/pi-like-rk3568-sbc-grows-sata-out-of...

"The Rock 3 Model A exploits the RK3568’s ability to multiplex SERDES lanes to enable SATA support on the dual USB 3.0 ports (OTG and host) via a SATA breakout cable."

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