Milk-V Goes After the Raspberry Pi Compute Module4 with RISC-V Alternative | Hacker News Reader

Milk-V Goes After the Raspberry Pi Compute Module4 with RISC-V Alternative

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53 pointsniel112 comments

PCIe gen2 x1 lane, aww I was hoping that there was an accessible low-power home NAS motherboard.

what's specifically preventing it from becoming just that?

Well in general you probably want to be able to hook anywhere from 2-8 drives to to a mini NAS. There seems to be sufficient cpu and Ethernet, but it seems to have no SATA ports, nor does it have say 4-16 lanes of gen3 or 4 Pcie available for either a multiport sata or nvme expander.

For a home NAS, I don't think you need that much. 8 drives is hardly "mini". I have a CM4-based NAS (with it's single PCIe lane) I built for home with 4 drives and it performs well enough for my needs.

Agreed, an average home NAS has two HDDs in RAID1. One drive faiks, it gets replacee. Synology allows to use Btrfs, other stuff leans towards ZFS, though Ext4FS would suffice (without features like snapshotting).

However I use a a Turing Pi 2 with 3x CM4 and 1x Jetson Nano. The Nano can utilize both NVMe and SATA while the CM4s cannot utilize NCMe. I'm using a MiniPCI to SATA converter for SATA. You could use a MiniPCI to NVMe converter though.

I have not set it up yet (I already have a working NAS and offsite backup NAS) but for the data you can use smaller SATA drives together with say Ceph or Longhorn.

Although the price (minus decked out RAM versions) for CM4s has settled as availability has been fixed, and the RK1 for Turing Pi 2 is also out, I would still welcome competition for CM4 and ARM64 in general.

Eight is excessive. 2-4 is probably the sweeter spot. I was just thinking if you’re going to the trouble of laying out a pcie slot, lay out a full 16 lanes and an expander board will slot 4-8 drives optionally.

wtf is this "SATA"? It is the 2000s? NVMe has been around for a decade and that is what these SoCs support.

HDDs that support NVMe are the minority and even then, PCIe riser cables are more expensive than SATA cables so you are wasting money on capabilities that a NAS doesn't even need. Even if you think an SSD based NAS is a good idea, you still need to backup that NAS onto HDDs at which point you run into the same problem. How do you plug them in without SATA?

Oh and by the way I bought SATA SSDs in 2018. SATA 6Gbps is quite an impressive standard given that it runs at such a high frequency and yet supports long cables unlike PCIe.

Some people want to build RISC-V NAS with spinning disks.

There's 20TB+ disks these days.

That's exactly what the Raspberry Pi CM4 has [1]. This board is designed to be as compatible as possible with the CM4.

The JH7110 SoC that is on the board has more and faster PCIe lanes than that. If you want to access them natively then get a standard board with that SoC, such as the StarFive VisionFive 2 (brings it out to M.2 M key), Pine64 Star64 (brings it out to a standard PCIe connector), or Milk-V Mars (M.2 E key).

The Milk-V Mars [2] with the same 2 GB RAM is only $5 more and and you get a gig ethernet socket, 3x USB3 & 1x USB2 sockets, a full size HDMI socket, eMMC slot, Micro SD slot, 40 pin GPIO header.

[1] https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/cm4/cm4-datasheet.pdf

[2] https://arace.tech/products/milk-v-mars

I've ordered both this risk-v cm4, and the Radxa Taco, which has 5 x sata + 1 nvme. Can't wait to test this.

Good! There are too many cool Raspberry Pi CM4 boards out there, but way too little CM4s to populate them.

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