Hacker News Reader

Comment by voidUpdate | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any recommendations for a CM carrier board that has ethernet and ~4 sata ports that I can attach external drives to? I'd quite like to build my own NAS but I don't know what board to use

View on HN

The best one for that (IMHO, though I should note this company sent me one to test, and it's been running my NVR for months now) is the Axzez Interceptor: https://www.axzez.com/product-page/interceptor-carrier-board

It's purpose-built for that, and they even have a rackmount chassis for it, though you could design your own too. Power for the drives requires a separate power supply though.

The other option right now is the Radxa Taco (https://radxa.com/products/io-board/taco/), but availability has been scarce. I've ordered one and will hopefully test it again soon, with the CM5!

(That is, if you're wanting to go down the Pi NAS route—there are certainly other options out there!)

Those both look good, though I might have to save up a bit to afford them haha. I'd probably end up printing my own case, so that's not really an issue. Looking forward to your testing of the CM5 Taco =)

I have the Taco and was about to ask whether you have tested it with the CM5 yet.

For some reason I thought that Radxa is about to deprecate the Taco but I might be mistaken.

The one issue I found that without a heat-sink, fan and any drives just idling on a 12V supply the board got really hot. So I have my questions about the efficiency of the board. I've been thinking about testing the power usage of it so maybe a good time to follow through on it.

I have one of these (the axzez board) with two hard drives in a cheap supermicro 1U case, works fine

In all honesty, and considering that everything you build with a SBC is not that powerful and a cabling mess, I would recommend to go for a refurbished ThinkCenter Tiny or similar + an external HDD Rack. Atleast thats the route I went, and I am vastly less annoyed about it.

I got a small thinkcenter a while back that I currently run some docker stuff on (homeassistant, pihole, some custom stuff), and I am pretty happy with it. Do they have a spare pcie or something to attach all the drives to, though? I don't remember seeing anything like that when I was inside mine, though that was a while back, so my memory may be wrong

In theory you can use the WiFi-One, though I don't know if that one is BIOS-locked. I just use it with USB3 and a 4 Bay Enclosure, which probably someone is gonna explain to me is the worst idea since leaded gasoline, but I have absolutely no Issues with my ZFS NAS for 5 years that way.

Ah, good point, I hadn't considered a USB solution. I might look into that, though I'll have to see if there's a good way to keep all the cables looking tidy and not have a cable coming out the front and then disappearing back inside again haha

I cut some kind of DIY-Rack on my Laser Cutter from Plywood, because I couldn't get it stored better in any way.

https://i.ibb.co/XWKDmwS/IMG-20241127-134555-527.jpg

Over on reddit I once floated a similar idea but everyone exclaimed that USB enclosures sucks and you should not use them at all. Now technically you could - with some PCIe expansion cards - connect SAS/SATA HDDs to the ports on your mini/SFF PC, but then you need an enclosure for holding, powering and cooling the disks. Holding and cooling is simple enough and there's enclosures on AliExpress that cost like 10 bucks that do it for you, but you'd still need a PSU outside of the PC to power the disks. At that point the USB enclosure starts looking even more enticing.

Which one are you using right now? There's some brands out there that are considered really bad by the community.

A 4-Bay one from Amazon, Icy-Box. Pretty Cheap. I decided on external Backup over Enterprise-Hardware. YMMV though.

https://www.amazon.de/ICY-BOX-Externes-Festplatten-Aluminium...

Which enclosure? I've got an upgrade on the horizon and like this solution.

A 4-Bay one from Amazon, Icy-Box. Pretty Cheap. I decided on external Backup over Enterprise-Hardware. YMMV though.

https://www.amazon.de/ICY-BOX-Externes-Festplatten-Aluminium...

Some of the models do - I have the M720q and it has a small form factor PCIe 8x slot on the motherboard, but you need a proprietary riser board (cheap on aliexpress) to convert it to a real PCIe slot, and it takes the place of the internal SATA drive cage and rear port adapters (VGA or serial or what have you) so you can't use those.

I'm using mine as an OpenWRT router with a dual 10 Gbe ethernet card in the PCIe slot ever since I got 10 Gbit internet at home and consumer 10 Gbit routers are expensive and leave a bit to be desired

These are raspberry hats that allow that, like the radxa penta sata hat or the geekworm x1009. I don't know how good they are though

Odroid H4+. Four SATA ports, 2x 2.5gig Ethernet, IBECC. Not a compute module/carrier board combination though. Also x86_64.

Yeah, I've been considering just going for an x86 thing, though finding a mini pc with 4 satas might be tough, and there's the whole raspi ecosystem that would help with troubleshooting. I'll add that to the potential list though =)

If you go with x86 you've got a bunch of people doing it under the "homelab" banner, so you'll hardly be alone.

The easiest way might be getting an ITX board with N100/150 from CWWK or Topton. They usually come with 4-6 SATA ports and the CPU soldered on. Then you just buy your favorite case and plug in your drives. Excluding the cost of the drives you might end up spending about $250, depending on your case and PSU selection. The problem with using SBCs or mini PCs that way is that you need an enclosure to hold, power, and cool down your disks, and even that is assuming that you can actually connect them via a SATA/SAS connection which may not be easily available from within your case.

Check out Hardware Haven on Youtube, he tests a bunch of different small form factor NAS computers and similar. I find the whole "raspi ecosystem" a bit overrated, for the most part it's Linux you're working with regardless of hardware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com