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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Dear ASUS: please make a range of NUC with either on-board 4+ SATA lanes or a PCIx instance which can take a daughtercard which does true parallel SATA, not serialised.

TL;DR the market for home RAID/NAS is huge. We need you to stop needing us to max out with only 1 device, and sometimes M.2 keying isn't where we are. People are well beyond "2 disks is enough" in a home NAS now.

thanksbai.

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The Helios64 was a serious contender with a promising future ... until the small team got hammered with pandemic and supply chain issues.

https://wiki.kobol.io/helios64/intro/

https://www.hackster.io/news/open-spec-nas-specialist-kobol-...

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/plrwos/looking...

Looking at the bandwidth numbers a PCIe 3 x4 slot (like those used for M.2 slots) should be good for 4x SATA 3 ports, no "serialization" required.

There's this https://www.tomshardware.com/news/silverstone-turns-one-m2-s... but it's only x2 and theoretically a bottleneck.

Thats my hope. So I may be "meh, we've moved on, M.2 is the universal glue" about this now.

Yes, ASUS makes one-liter small PCs with two M.2 PCIe 4.0 sockets, e.g. PN53 (AMD) or PN64-E1 (Intel Raptor Lake; the -E1 is essential, PN64 is a very different worse computer). Beelink, Minisforum and others also make similar small computers with two M.2 2280 sockets.

If the bottom cover is removed, one can add two of these adapters from M.2 key M to five SATA ports:

Delock Converter M.2 2280 Key B+M male to 5 x SATA with heat sink

https://www.delock.com/produkt/64051/merkmale.html?g=1818

In this way one can connect up to eleven SSDs/HDDs to such a small computer (it already has one SATA port). Making an improvised support for them is easy, e.g. one can reuse the removable cage from an old computer case. One can make a cut through the bottom cover for passing the SATA cables and the internal SSD/HDD cage can be removed if it gets in the way.

I long considered doing this and I the end decided storage should be an appliance not seen or heard from which is relatively self managed and hot swappable and doesn’t require too much maintenance. Qnap/synology was dropped in and hasn’t been heard from in years.

There should be a dedicated ssd nas, that would be quite cool.

Setting up local compute was worth looking at on its own.

Sincere question: How are you even going to fit more than one 2.5" drive in a NUC? These things are tiny.

Cable(s) out to an external drive holder with an ATX -> Sata uplift from a DC psu.

I run the radxa USB3->SATA bridge pi-Hat which is a jmicron chipset and with the vagueries of USB- attached drives, but SATA like speed through a serialising controller I do pretty well. I'd like to do astonishingly well.

So the use case is "yea I can't fit it inside the NUC case but I can bridge it to a small box" -or run the NUC with the lid off and re-tool the case.

What you’re describing is not a product, it’s a kludge. Even if you can stomach the poor reliability of an octopus of wires, a product designed to be used like that is likely to fail EMI testing.

I’ve certainly done this with SAS Harnesses coming out the side of my tower case, but you can’t expect a company to make a product with this use case in mind. There exists SFF NAS boxes with room for many drives for this purpose.

The NAS boxes I can see either assume USB-C or don't seem to provide much clue to how to use an eSATA to connect between things. If they were easy to work with I think there would be a lot more 'use this box to house the disks and this cable to connect over to the computer' and sure, I'd use the single SATA at some saturated speed.

I live in ZFS. These box makers often assume you want to run their Raid card, and have optioned up 'to make it better' without understanding ZFS exists, uses its memory efficiently (ignore the 'not on less than 4GB' thing its highly specific to some time in history and de-dupe) and wants a dull-as-ditchwater HBA to talk to the drives. Or, worse yet, they embed the CPU and you buy their packaged solution with their suite of apps and their model of GUI. Like the NAS I moved off, which had a sparc CPU and ceased being able to run, aside from which it was locked to <2TB drives.

You're not wrong btw. I am just saying "no, the home NAS space isn't as easy as you say, if you want to run ZFS yourself" unless I have missed a key term to search for, getting standalone drive enclosures.

I can believe I am not the market. Mainly because very few SBCs have more than one SATA slot, even less more than 2 and many of the M.2 keyed sata cards are listed in a homebrew filestore page with "odd chip, drivers uncommon" -If I was the market I am sure by now, more of them would be mainstream and more web pages would say "sure: its easy!"

Pretty much any HBA has a passthrough mode. It’s what I’m using with my HP micro server gen8 to run Unraid.

if you don't care about having it all fit inside a case, then the NUC isn't really doing anything for you. just grab any motherboard you want and build yourself a heap of parts like my NAS: https://ibb.co/6W7MkL4

So, since the form factor isn't the goal here (separate box with umbilical cord, after all), what exactly is the purpose in using a NUC or similarly sized small computer?

None of this is intended to be condescending or anything, I'm just sincerely curious about the train of logic here. What you're talking about so far seems like something that would be satisfied by a custom Mini-ITX build with appropriate case/tower or something similar, so I would like to know why that isn't.

Fanless. It's about low noise. Reusing a fullsize case with a fanless mini itx board might be the way to go if the passive cooling worked out. The NAS with fan in use now has a noise penalty I want to avoid.

I've used NUC and they are remarkably well made but you're on the money: they just may not be a good "fit"

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