Building a tiny 6-drive M.2 NAS with the Rock 5 model B | Hacker News Reader

Building a tiny 6-drive M.2 NAS with the Rock 5 model B

jeffgeerling.com

29 pointsmikece22 comments

I'm confused about what I'm seeing. That machine has just 4 lanes of PCIE gen3. No details at all about the "daughterboards" / carrierboards for the M.2 drives.

Also near the end he's talking about 100Mb/s write speeds, which is worse than what I'm getting with SATA HDDs (of the spinning rust variety).

I have a whole bunch of 1Tb NVMe drives I pulled from servers and would really love an inexpensive solution to chuck them all in for a NAS, and this article's title gave me hope, but I don't think it's what I'm looking for.

Even if the read speeds are limited by the drive interface, for a NAS, 100Mb/s decent for the most common denominating factor - a gigabit link.

It has a 2.5gb link, per the article

Its a clickbait article from the "better than raspberry pi" variety

It probably gives each drive 1 pcie gen2 lane? Or maybe two drives get a gen3 lane and the other four get gen2... I dunno. There is very little details on how he made it happen in the text, that is to be sure.

This kit uses SATA, relying on one of those M.2 6-port SATA adapters for the split-out, and a custom PCB sandwich that routes the SATA signals to three sets of two slots.

I really hope that when the Pi 5 comes out that the one thing they change is the number of PCIe lanes in a meaningful way.

As much as I’d like all sorts of other improvement, this one improvement is far above the rest for me.

For those who still don't trust solid state disks for a NAS, this one might be an option to use good old spinning rust drives with small Linux boards.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/313880737600

The chip is well supported under Linux.

https://www.jmicron.com/file/download/996/JMB585.pdf

There are also similar cards employing the JMB575 port multiplier.

example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134517464170

(no relation with the sellers, just search for "m.2 5 port sata")

Someone has even spec'd out an RK3568-based NAS that uses a JMB585.

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/User:CounterPillow/NAS-Board

I wish 2.5 SATA SSD could be powered with one data/power cable.

Would love to see RISC-V chips that compete for offering 4 - 32x lanes of PCIe.

Hifive Unmatched has 16x PCIe 3.0, and is $665. It's 1.5 years old, and still one of the few sub $1000 systems with more than 4x lanes. https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched

Wish this kind of hw were available for x86. Just give us the m2 slots and let software take care of the rest.

Buy a x86 motherboard and plug this into it.

https://www.newegg.com/riitop-4p-nvtpce16x-pci-express-contr...

Can throughly recommend these.. Currently running one of these with 4x4TB and it’s lovely, as long as your Chipset supports PCI-E bifurcation..

It is: https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=80

https://www.servethehome.com/asustor-flashstor-12-pro-fs6712...

its called $100 2 year old laptop with cracked screen

four slots or more and reasonable prize?

who cares about slots old x86 kit has very good throughput even if a laptop will only typically expose a couple slots (btw the rock5 only has 2 m.2 slots, this uses a breakout board).

1 to 4 pcie splitters are $10-20. In case of laptop you can use https://aliexpress.com/item/1005004873201793.html

LattePanda or Zima Board plus some adapters is the closest possibility right now but there are price and power efficiency tradeoff a in both cases.

I think if I was going to build a NAS, I would just use USB 3.0 drives. Easier to connect directly to for debugging, more common standard hardware and cases, and mostly fast enough.

This might be amazing for non-NAS stuff with heavier bandwidth requirements though.

This is super cool. I wish the hardware was available to make a comparable tiny TrueNAS system with ECC ram.

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