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Comment by anfractuosity | Hacker News Reader

The DeskMeet X600 looks rather interesting especially re. the ECC RAM.

You don't happen to know of anything similar with more than 2 x 3.5" drive bays per chance? I'm looking for a low powered device with ECC RAM to use as a NAS.

I've been looking at HP Microserver Gen8 boxes, which I think are fairly low power, but I believe they're rather old now.

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> low powered device with ECC RAM to use as a NAS

QNAP has a $600 1U short-depth (11") 4x3.5 2xM.2 2x10GbE 2x2.5GbE 4-32GB DDR4 SODIMM Arm NAS that would benefit from OSS community attention. Based on a Marvell/Armada CN9130 SoC which supports ECC, it has mainline Linux support, and public-but-non-upstream code for uboot. With local serial console and a bit of effort, the QNAP OS can be replaced by Arm Debian/Devuan with ZFS. Rare combo of low power, small size, fast network, ECC memory and upstream-friendly Linux. QNAP also sell a 10GbE router based on the same SoC, which is a successor to the Armada 388 in Helios4 NAS (RIP), https://kobol.io/helios4/

In theory, ex-Apple Qualcomm Nuvia/Oryon Snapdragon boards would make a great NAS, but it may take a while for Linux support to mature. Upcoming AMD "AI 300" Zen5 Strix Point mobile chips are intended to compete with Qualcomm, so they can hopefully be configured with low (15W-54W) power consumption, and ECC support has been good on AMD devices when the BIOS cooperates. Intel Lunar Lake has low power, but Intel ECC support is market segmented to Xeon SKUs, except for the anomalous Coffee Lake Celeron G4930T (35W TDP).

To decouple storage enclosure logistics from the NAS CPU, a mainboard with Thunderbolt or USB4 enables an external NVME enclosure with DIY bridge of multiple SATA ports or PCIe HBA to JBOD.

Thanks for that information re. the ARM based QNAP device. I'd not heard of that before. Would you mind pointing me to the u-boot code you mentioned?

I think I'm right in thinking https://ukstore.qnap.com/catalog/product/view/id/215 is the machine you meant?

Yes, TS-435XeU, forgot to link it.

I've not yet built uboot myself, but these repos claim to have code for CN9130.

https://github.com/SolidRun/cn913x_build/

https://github.com/SolidRun/u-boot/tree/u-boot-v2019.10-marv...

https://solidrun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/developer/pages/3...

I think you will need to go for a custom (i.e., one you buy without the mainboard pre-assembled into a complete barebone/system) case to get that. Jonsbo has a few probably interesting options for you, such as the N3[0][1]. I don't know if you could make the DeskMeet mainboards fit in that particular case - but many regular ITX boards for AM4 and AM5 come with ECC support, too.

[0]: https://geizhals.eu/jonsbo-n3-schwarz-n3-black-a3062571.html [1]: https://www.jonsbo.com/en/products/N3.html

Thanks for your links and information re. AM4,5.

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