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0 pointsvladvasiliu5y ago0 comments

There are similar motherboards with 4 SATA ports. I have an older Gigabyte GA-J3455N-D3H with 4 SATA ports and two gigabit network controllers that cost in the same ballpark as GP's model.

RAM is accounted for in GP's description.

Regarding the boot drive, you can either boot from the data disks (say via a common ZFS pool or a common raid + lvm) or if you're happy with a SD card for the PI, I suppose a small USB drive would do the trick.

Regarding the PSU, but you'd need a beefy adapter anyway for running 4 drives, which isn't cheap, and there are cheap pico-atx PSUs available. I bought a compact case + PSU for my board for 50 euros around two years ago [1] that's still going strong (although I'm only running a single SSD in it), so the PSU alone should be less than that.

There's of course the power efficiency question and I presume this setup would be somewhat more power hungry than an RPI. The Intel specs for the J3455 give it at 10W TDP. I have no idea how much RAM consumes, but it's likely a few more watts.

[0] https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-J3455N-D3H-rev-10#ov

[1] https://www.inter-tech.de/en/products/case/mini-itx-nuc/itx-...

0 comments

StillBored5y ago

Well there are mITX boards with 8 or more SATA ports, and a lot of mATX boards with the same.

But the key differentiator IMHO is ECC and 10G. If one picks a board like https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/C246N-WU2-rev-10 it then becomes possible to put a i3-9100/etc on it and gain ECC support. Given the 8 onboard SATA ports, and a 10G+ nic in the PCIe slot, you have a NAS that can best nearly everything on the market below a couple thousand dollars. There of course is a pretty wide range of atom/xeon boards with BMC's, and all of the above including the 10G. In the past I ran a https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C... which has 12 sata ports, ECC and a BMC.

But, yes it will consume more than a rpi, and CPU power rating isnt everything. Having 8+ sata ports, bmcs, 10G ethernet, etc all up the board power consumption. But on the other hand, that i3 is rated for 65W, but idles at ~5 on a modern board, which is in the ballpark of the 2-3W of my RPi4 (which only swings a watt or so, and doesn't include the USB3 hub+devices).

So, given the NAS spends a lot of its time idle, and the power only spikes (and never to anything close to 65W) when its being used, it seems the extra power is worth the extra performance. I could probably fix the max frequency at 2Ghz like the RPi and save even more power.

tutfbhuf5y ago

> Regarding the PSU, but you'd need a beefy adapter anyway for running 4 drives

How about 2.5 inch drives? I'm thinking about: https://cdn-reichelt.de/bilder/web/xxl_ws/A300/RPI_NAS_4XSAT...

vladvasiliuOP5y ago

Regarding power usage, I'm not very familiar with how those drives compare [0]. To be honest, power consumption was of interest for the build I was talking about because I wanted it to be fanless (I actually ended up adding a very silent fan, just for peace of mind). For my NAS needs, I'm building in a recycled server, so power usage isn't as much of a concern.

However, I did look for 2.5" drives (the server comes with a 2.5" backplane) and there don't seem to be many "consumer" drives in this format that are both high capacity (>2 TB) and non SMR (I'll be running ZFS). I'm also not looking to spend very much, so SSDs are out.

[0] Seagate specs for 2.5" Barracuda: https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/barracud...

The startup current is 1.2 A under 5V. So if you're running four of them, you'll need 24 W just for the drives. Not sure if the "cheap" enclosures are able to stagger drive startup.

My Gigabyte motherboard cannot, so it would require a PSU large enough to drive both the board (CPU + RAM + etc) and the drives for a little while. So with four drives, you'd be looking at 50 W to be sure it fits.

tutfbhuf5y ago

50W is way more than I am willing to operate. I want it to be extremely low powered. I think that a 2.5 inch SSD might be a better fit for me then, maybe M.2 if there's a adapter for the PI.

SSD and low cost is still possible, but one has to make compromises in terms of storage size. A 1 TB network drive would be enough for my use case, be it 4 x 256 SSD's or one big.

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roseway45y ago

I went looking for 2.5 inch NAS/ video recorder drives this past weekend and came up empty handed. I’d hoped to install them into a mini-pc NVR. The form-factor doesn’t appear to lend itself to the reliability drive manufacturers target for this class of drive. They’re optimized for high write speeds and very high write loads. You can of course use consumer laptop drives in a NAS, but write speeds will be lower and reliability may suffer.

tutfbhuf5y ago

> speeds will be lower and reliability may suffer

1Gbps is the max. anyways for my home setup, no matter how fast the drive is and I have a backup for important stuff, I'm not dependent on enterprise NAS drives.

I want: extremely small, low cost and very low watt usage.

1 more reply

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0 pointsvladvasiliu5y ago0 comments

There are similar motherboards with 4 SATA ports. I have an older Gigabyte GA-J3455N-D3H with 4 SATA ports and two gigabit network controllers that cost in the same ballpark as GP's model.

RAM is accounted for in GP's description.

[0] https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-J3455N-D3H-rev-10#ov

[1] https://www.inter-tech.de/en/products/case/mini-itx-nuc/itx-...

0 comments

StillBored5y ago

Well there are mITX boards with 8 or more SATA ports, and a lot of mATX boards with the same.

tutfbhuf5y ago

> Regarding the PSU, but you'd need a beefy adapter anyway for running 4 drives

How about 2.5 inch drives? I'm thinking about: https://cdn-reichelt.de/bilder/web/xxl_ws/A300/RPI_NAS_4XSAT...

vladvasiliuOP5y ago

[0] Seagate specs for 2.5" Barracuda: https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/barracud...

The startup current is 1.2 A under 5V. So if you're running four of them, you'll need 24 W just for the drives. Not sure if the "cheap" enclosures are able to stagger drive startup.

tutfbhuf5y ago

50W is way more than I am willing to operate. I want it to be extremely low powered. I think that a 2.5 inch SSD might be a better fit for me then, maybe M.2 if there's a adapter for the PI.

SSD and low cost is still possible, but one has to make compromises in terms of storage size. A 1 TB network drive would be enough for my use case, be it 4 x 256 SSD's or one big.

1 more reply

roseway45y ago

tutfbhuf5y ago

> speeds will be lower and reliability may suffer

1Gbps is the max. anyways for my home setup, no matter how fast the drive is and I have a backup for important stuff, I'm not dependent on enterprise NAS drives.

I want: extremely small, low cost and very low watt usage.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse