Introduction
Introduction Statistics Contact Development Disclaimer Help
_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip
jhancock wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
thanks for the article.
I'm dreaming of this: mini-nas connected direct to my tv via HDMI or
USB. I think I'd want HMDI and let the nas handle streaming/decoding.
But if my TV can handle enough formats. maybe USB will do.
anyone have experience with this?
I've been using a combination of media server on my Mac with client on
Apple TV and I have no end of glitches.
deanc wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
Just get a nvidia shield. It plays pretty much anything still even
though a fairly old device. Your aim should not be to transcode but
to just send data when it comes to video.
dwood_dev wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
I've been running Plex on my AppleTV 4k for years with few issues.
It gets a lot of use in my household. I have my server (a headless
Intel iGPU box) running it in docker with the Intel iGPU encoder
passed through.
I let the iGPU default encode everything realtime, and now that plex
has automatic subtitle sync, my main source of complaints is gone. I
end up with a wide variety of formats as my wife enjoys obscure
media.
One of the key things that helped a lot was segregating Anime to it
own TV collection so that anime specific defaults can be applied
there.
You can also run a client on one of these machines directly, but then
you are dealing with desktop Linux.
aesh2Xa1 wrote 5 hours 18 min ago:
Streaming (e.g., Plex or Jellyfin or some UPnP server) helps you send
the data to the TV client over the network from a remote server.
As you want to bring the data server right to the TV, and you'll
output the video via HDMI, just use any PC. There are plenty of them
designed for this (usually they're fanless for reducing noise)...
search "home theater PC."
You can install Kodi as the interface/organizer for playing your
media files. It handles the all the formats... the TV is just the
ouput.
A USB CEC adapter will also allow you to use your TV remote with
Kodi.
jhancock wrote 5 hours 8 min ago:
thanks!
I've tried Plex, Jellyfin etc on my Mac. I've tried three different
Apple TV apps as streaming client (Infuse, etc). They are all
glitchy. Another key problem is if I want to bypass the streaming
server on my Mac and have Infuse on the Apple TV just read files
from the Mac the option is Windows NFS protocol...which gives way
too much sharing by providing the Infuse app with a Mac
id/password.
waterhouse wrote 6 hours 42 min ago:
> Testing it out with my disk benchmarking script, I got up to 3 GB/sec
in sequential reads.
To be sure... is the data compressible, or repeated? I have
encountered an SSD that silently performed compression on the data I
wrote to it (verified by counting its stats on blocks written). I
don't know if there are SSDs that silently deduplicate the data.
(An obvious solution is to copy data from /dev/urandom. But beware of
the CPU cost of /dev/urandom; on a recent machine, it takes 3 seconds
to read 1GB from /dev/urandom, so that would be the bottleneck in a
write test. But at least for a read test, it doesn't matter how long
the data took to write.)
ksec wrote 6 hours 44 min ago:
Something that Apple should have done with TimeCapsule iOS but they
were too focused on service revenue.
getcrunk wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
Whenever these things come up I have to point out the most of these
manufactures don’t do bios updates. Since spectre/meltdown we see cpu
and bios vulnerabilities every few months-yearly.
I know u can patch microcode at runtime/boot but I don’t think that
covers all vulnerabilities
transpute wrote 6 hours 34 min ago:
Hence the need for coreboot support.
ezschemi wrote 7 hours 4 min ago:
I was about to order that GMKtek G9 and then saw Jeff's video about it
on the same day. All those issues, even with the later fixes he showed,
are a big no-no for me. Instead, I went with a Odroid H4-Ultra with an
Intel N305, 48GB Crucial DDR5 and 4x4TB Samsung 990 Evo SSDs (low-power
usage) + a 2TB SATA SSD to boot from. Yes, the SSDs are way overkill
and pretty expensive at $239 per Samsung 990 Evo (got them with a deal
at Amazon). It's running TrueNAS.
I am somewhat space-limited with this system, didn't want spinning
disks (as the whole house slightly shakes when pickup or trash trucks
pass by), wanted a fun project and I also wanted to go as small as
possible.
No issues so far. The system is completely stable. Though, I did add a
separate fan at the bottom of the Odroid case to help cool the NVMe
SSDs. Even with the single lane of PCIe, the 2.5gbit/s networking gets
maxed out. Maybe I could try bonding the 2 networking ports but I don't
have any client devices that could use it.
I had an eye on the Beelink ME Mini too, but I don't think the NVMe
disks are sufficiently cooled under load, especially on the outer side
of the disks.
wpm wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
> (as the whole house slightly shakes when pickup or trash trucks
pass by)
I have the same problem, but it is not a problem for my Seagate X16s,
that have been going strong for years.
kristianp wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
How does this happen? Wooden house? Only 2-3 metres from the road?
atmanactive wrote 5 hours 26 min ago:
Which load, 250MB/s? Modern NVMes are rated for ~20x speeds. Running
at such a low bandwidth, they'll stay at idle temperatures at all
times.
riobard wrote 10 hours 15 min ago:
I’ve been always puzzled by the strange choice of raiding multiple
small capacity M.2 NVMe in these tiny low-end Intel boxes with severely
limited PCIe lanes using only one lane per SSD.
Why not a single large capacity M.2 SSD using 4 full lanes and proper
backup with a cheaper , larger capacity and more reliable spinning
disk?
tiew9Vii wrote 10 hours 6 min ago:
The latest small M.2 NAS’s make very good consumer grade, small,
quiet, power efficient storage you can put in your living room, next
to the tv for media storage and light network attached storage.
It’d be great if you could fully utilise the M.2 speed but they are
not about that.
Why not a single large M.2? Price.
riobard wrote 10 hours 0 min ago:
Would four 2TB SSD be more or less expensive than one 8TB SSD? And
also counting power efficiency and RAID complexity?
adgjlsfhk1 wrote 8 hours 14 min ago:
4 small drives+raid gives you redundancy.
foobiekr wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
Given the write patterns of RAID and the wear issues of flash,
it's not obvious at all that 4xNVME actually gives you
meaningful redundancy.
geerlingguy wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
And often are about the same price or less expensive than the
one 8TB NVMe.
I'm hopeful 4/8 TB NVMe drives will come down in price someday
but they've been remarkably steady for a few years.
FloatArtifact wrote 10 hours 30 min ago:
I think the N100 and N150 suffer the same weakness for this type of use
case in the context of SSD storage 10gb networking. We need a next
generation chip that can leverage more PCI lanes with roughly the same
power efficiency.
I would remove points for a built-in non-modular standardized power
supply. It's not fixable, and it's not comparable to Apple in quality.
monster_truck wrote 10 hours 48 min ago:
These are cute, I'd really like to see the "serious" version.
Something like a Ryzen 7745, 128gb ecc ddr5-5200, no less than two
10gbe ports (though unrealistic given the size, if they were sfp+
that'd be incredible), drives split across two different nvme raid
controllers. I don't care how expensive or loud it is or how much power
it uses, I just want a coffee-cup sized cube that can handle the kind
of shit you'd typically bring a rack along for. It's 2025.
windowsrookie wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
The Mac Studio is pretty close + silent and power efficient. But it's
isn't cheap like an N100 PC.
varispeed wrote 8 hours 41 min ago:
Best bet probably Flashstor FS6812X [1] Not the "cube" sized, but
surprisingly small still. I've got one under the desk, so I don't
even register it is there. Stuffed it with 4x 4TB drives for now.
[1]: https://www.asustor.com/en-gb/product?p_id=91
Palomides wrote 10 hours 27 min ago:
the minisforum devices are probably the closest thing to that
unfortunately most people still consider ECC unnecessary, so options
are slim
gorkish wrote 11 hours 32 min ago:
NVMe NAS is completely and totally pointless with such crap
connectivity.
What in the WORLD is preventing these systems from getting at least
10gbps interfaces? I have been waiting for years and years and years
and years and the only thing on the market for small systems with good
networking is weird stuff that you have to email Qotom to order direct
from China and _ONE_ system from Minisforum.
I'm beginning to think there is some sort of conspiracy to not allow
anything smaller than a full size ATX desktop to have anything faster
than 2.5gbps NICs. (10gbps nics that plug into NVMe slots are not the
solution.)
windowsrookie wrote 6 hours 54 min ago:
You can order the Mac mini with 10gbps networking and it has 3
thunderbolt 4 ports if you need more. Plus it has an internal power
supply making it smaller than most of these mini PCs.
geerlingguy wrote 5 hours 53 min ago:
That's what I'm running as my main desktop at home, and I have an
external 2TB TB5 SSD, which gives me 3 GB/sec.
If I could get the same unit for like $299 I'd run it like that for
my NAS too, as long as I could run a full backup to another device
(and a 3rd on the cloud with Glacier of course).
lmz wrote 8 hours 3 min ago:
Not many people have fiber at home. Copper 10gig is power hungry and
demands good cabling.
zerd wrote 8 hours 23 min ago:
It's annoying, around 10 years ago 10gbps was just starting to become
more and more standard on bigger NAS, and 10gbps switches were
starting to get cheaper, but then 2.5GbE came out and they all
switched to that.
atmanactive wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
That's because 10GbE tech is not there yet. Everything overheats
and drops-out all the time, while 2.5GbE just works. In several
years from now, this will all change, of course.
wpm wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
Speak for yourself. I have AQC cards in a PC and a Mac, Intel
gear in my servers, and I can easily sustain full speed.
PhilipRoman wrote 9 hours 51 min ago:
It especially sucks when even low end mini PCs have at least multiple
5Gbps USB ports, yet we are stuck with 1Gbps (or 2.5, if manufacturer
is feeling generous) ethernet. Maybe IP over Thunderbolt will finally
save us.
9x39 wrote 10 hours 39 min ago:
>What in the WORLD is preventing these systems from getting at least
10gbps interfaces?
Price and price. Like another commenter said, there is at least one
10Gbe mini NAS out there, but it's several times more expensive.
What's the use case for the 10GbE? Is ~200MB/sec not enough?
I think the segment for these units is low price, small size, shared
connectivity. The kind of thing you tuck away in your house invisibly
and silently, or throw in a bag to travel with if you have a few
laptops that need shared storage. People with high performance needs
probably already have fast nvme local storage is probably the
thinking.
wpm wrote 3 hours 14 min ago:
> What's the use case for the 10GbE? Is ~200MB/sec not enough?
When I'm talking to an array of NVMe? No where near enough, not
when each drive could do 1000MB/s of sequential writes without
breaking a sweat.
CharlesW wrote 11 hours 26 min ago:
> What in the WORLD is preventing these systems from getting at least
10gbps interfaces?
They definitely exist, two examples with 10 GbE being the QNAP
TBS-h574TX and the Asustor Flashstor 12 Pro FS6712X.
QuiEgo wrote 11 hours 30 min ago:
Consider the terramaster f8 ssd
sorenjan wrote 11 hours 39 min ago:
Is it possible (and easy) to make a NAS with harddrives for storage and
an SSD for cache? I don't have any data that I use daily or even
weekly, so I don't want the drives spinning needlessly 24/7, and I
think an SSD cache would stop having to spin them up most of the time.
For instance, most reads from a media NAS will probably be biased
towards both newly written files, and sequentially (next episode). This
is a use case CPU cache usually deals with transparently when reading
from RAM.
Nursie wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
I used to run a zfs setup with an ssd for L2ARC and SLOG.
Can’t tell you how it worked out performance-wise, because I
didn’t really benchmark it. But it was easy enough to set up.
These days I just use SATA SSDs for the whole array.
QuiEgo wrote 11 hours 25 min ago:
[1] I do this. One mergerfs mount with an ssd and three hdds made to
look like one disk. Mergerfs is set to write to the ssd if it’s not
full, and read from the ssd first.
A chron job moves out the oldest files on the ssd once per night to
the hdds (via a second mergerfs mount without the ssd) if the ssd is
getting full.
I have a fourth hdd that uses snap raid to protect the ssd and other
hdds.
[1]: https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs/blob/master/mkdocs/docs...
QuiEgo wrote 11 hours 16 min ago:
Also, [1] which moves files between disks based on their state in a
Plex DB
[1]: https://github.com/bexem/PlexCache
op00to wrote 11 hours 39 min ago:
Yes. You can use dm-cache.
sorenjan wrote 11 hours 32 min ago:
Thanks. I looked it up and it seems that lvmcache uses dm-cache and
is easier to use, I guess putting that in front of some kind of
RAID volume could be a good solution.
guerby wrote 11 hours 58 min ago:
Related question: does anyone know of an usb-c powerbank that can be
effectively used as UPS? That is to say is able to be charged while
maintaining power to load (obviously with rate of charge greater by a
few watts than load).
Most models I find reuse the most powerful usb-c port as ... recharging
port so unusable as DC UPS.
Context: my home server is my old [1] motherboard running proxmox VE
with 64GB RAM and 4 TB NVME, powered by usb-c and drawing ... 2 Watt at
idle.
[1]: https://frame.work
j45 wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
Any reaons you can't run a USB-C brick attached to a UPS? Some UPS'
likely have USB plugs in them too.
1oooqooq wrote 12 hours 26 min ago:
I will wait until the have AMD efficient chip for one very simple
reason: AMD graciously allow ECC on some* cpus.
*well, they allowed on all CPUs, but after zen3 they saw how much money
intel was making and joined in. now you must get a "PRO" cpu, to get
ECC support, even on mobile (but good luck finding ECC sodimm).
wpm wrote 3 hours 8 min ago:
And good luck finding a single fucking computer for sale that even
uses these "Pro" CPUs, because they sure as hell don't sell them to
the likes of Minisforum and Beelink.
There was some stuff in DDR5 that made ECC harder to implement
(unlike DDR4 where pretty much everything AMD made supported
unbuffered ECC by default), but its still ridiculous how hard it is
to find something that supports DDR5 ECC that doesn't suck down 500W
at idle.
bhouston wrote 12 hours 56 min ago:
I am currently running a 8 4TB NVMe NAS via OpenZFS on TrueNAS Linux.
It is good but my box is quite large. I made this via a standard AMD
motherboard with both built-in NVMe slots as well as a bunch of
expansion PCEi cards. It is very fast.
I was thinking of replacing it with a Asustor FLASHSTOR 12, much more
compact form factor and it fits up to 12 NVMes. I will miss TrueNAS
though, but it would be so much smaller.
layer8 wrote 11 hours 9 min ago:
You can install TrueNAS on it:
[1]: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/how-i-installed-truen...
moondev wrote 11 hours 25 min ago:
You can install truenas Linux on the flashstor12. It has no GPU or
video out, but I installed a m.2 GPU to attach a HDMI monitor
archagon wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
These look compelling, but unfortunately, we know that SSDs are not
nearly as reliable as spinning rust hard drives when it comes to data
retention: [1] (I assume M.2 cards are the same, but have not
confirmed.)
If this isn’t running 24/7, I’m not sure I would trust it with my
most precious data.
Also, these things are just begging for a 10Gbps Ethernet port, since
you're going to lose out on a ton of bandwidth over 2.5Gbps... though I
suppose you could probably use the USB-C port for that.
[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered-s...
ac29 wrote 10 hours 44 min ago:
Your link is talking about leaving drives unpowered for years. That
would be a very odd use of a NAS.
archagon wrote 10 hours 41 min ago:
True, but it's still concerning. For example, I have a NAS with
some long-term archives that I power on maybe once a month. Am I
going to see SSD data loss from a usage pattern like that?
adgjlsfhk1 wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
no. SSD data loss is in the ~years range
ozim wrote 13 hours 40 min ago:
So Jeff is really decent guy that doesn’t keep terabytes of Linux
ISOs.
attendant3446 wrote 13 hours 45 min ago:
I was recently looking for a mini PC to use as a home server with,
extendable storage. After comparing different options (mostly Intel), I
went with the Ryzen 7 5825U (Beelink SER5 Pro) instead. It has an M.2
slot for an SSD and I can install a 2.5" HDD too. The only downside is
that the HDD is limited by height to 7 mm (basically 2 TB storage
limit), but I have a 4 TB disk connected via USB for "cold" storage.
After years of using different models with Celeron or Intel N CPUs,
Ryzen is a beast (and TDP is only 15W). In my case, AMD now replaced
almost all the compute power in my home (with the exception of the
smartphone) and I don't see many reasons to go back to Intel.
miladyincontrol wrote 13 hours 56 min ago:
Still think its highly underrated to use fs-cache with NASes (usually
configured with cachefilesd) for some local dynamically scaling
client-side nvme caching.
Helps a ton with response times with any NAS thats primarily spinning
rust, especially if dealing with decent amount of small files.
sandreas wrote 13 hours 56 min ago:
While it may be tempting to go "mini" and NVMe, for a normal use case I
think this is hardly cost effective.
You give up so much by using an all in mini device...
No Upgrades, no ECC, harder cooling, less I/O.
I have had a Proxmox Server with a used Fujitsu D3417 and 64gb ecc for
roughly 5 years now, paid 350 bucks for the whole thing and upgraded
the storage once from 1tb to 2tb. It draws 12-14W in normal day use and
has 10 docker containers and 1 windows VM running.
So I would prefer a mATX board with ECC, IPMI 4xNVMe and 2.5GB over
these toy boxes...
However, Jeff's content is awesome like always
layoric wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
No ECC is the biggest trade off for me, but the C236 express chipset
has very little choice for CPUs, they are all 4 core 8 thread. Ive
got multiple x99 platform systems and for a long time they were the
king of cost efficiency, but lately the ryzen laptop chips are
becoming too good to pass up, even without ECC. Eg Ryzen 5825u minis
mytailorisrich wrote 40 min ago:
For a home NAS, ECC is as needed as it is on your laptop.
ndiddy wrote 10 hours 34 min ago:
Another thing is that unless you have a very specific need for SSDs
(such as heavily random access focused workloads, very tight space
constraints, or working in a bumpy environment), mechanical hard
drives are still way more cost effective for storing lots of data
than NVMe. You can get a manufacturer refurbished 12TB hard drive
with a multi-year warranty for ~$120, while even an 8TB NVMe drive
goes for at least $500. Of course for general-purpose internal
drives, NVMe is a far better experience than a mechanical HDD, but my
NAS with 6 hard drives in RAIDz2 still gets bottlenecked by my
2.5GBit LAN, not the speeds of the drives.
throw0101d wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
> […] mechanical hard drives are still way more cost effective
for storing lots of data than NVMe.
Linux ISOs?
acranox wrote 9 hours 57 min ago:
Don’t forget about power. If you’re trying to build a low
power NAS, those hdds idle around 5w each, while the ssd is closer
to 5mw. Once you’ve got a few disks, the HDDs can account for
half the power or more. The cost penalty for 2TB or 4TB ssds is
still big, but not as bad as at the 8TB level.
markhahn wrote 9 hours 14 min ago:
such power claims are problematic - you're not letting the HDs
spin down, for instance, and not crediting the fact that an SSD
may easily dissipate more power than an HD under load. (in this
thread, the host and network are slow, so it's not relevant that
SSDs are far faster when active.)
1over137 wrote 8 hours 27 min ago:
Letting hdds spin down is generally not advisable in a NAS,
unless you access it really rarely perhaps.
sandreas wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
Is there any (semi-)scientific proof to that (serious
question)? I did search a lot to this topic but found
nothing...
(see above, same question)
philjohn wrote 8 hours 27 min ago:
There's a lot of "never let your drive spin down! They need to
be running 24/7 or they'll die in no time at all!" voices in
the various homelab communities sadly.
Even the lower tier IronWolf drives from Seagate specify 600k
load/unload cycles (not spin down, granted, but gives an idea
of the longevity).
sandreas wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
Is there any (semi-)scientific proof to that (serious
question)? I did search a lot to this topic but found
nothing...
espadrine wrote 47 min ago:
Here is someone that had significant corruption until they
stopped: [1] There are many similar articles.
[1]: https://www.xda-developers.com/why-not-to-spin-dow...
cyanydeez wrote 11 hours 10 min ago:
I've had a synology since 2015. Why, besides the drives themselves,
would most home labs need to upgrade?
I don't really understand the general public, or even most usages,
requiring upgrade paths beyond get a new device.
By the time the need to upgrade comes, the tech stack is likely
faster and you're basically just talking about gutting the PC and
doing everything over again, except maybe power supply.
dragontamer wrote 9 hours 14 min ago:
> except maybe power supply.
Modern Power MOSFETs are cheaper and more efficient. 10 Years ago
80Gold efficiency was a bit expensive and 80Bronze was common.
Today, 80Gold is cheap and common and only 80Platinum reaches into
the exotic level.
sandreas wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
A 80Bronze 300W can still be more efficient than a 750W
80Platinum on mainly low loads. Additionally, some of the devices
are way more efficient than they are certified for. A well known
example is the Corsair RM550x (2021).
If your peak power draw is <200W, I would recommend an efficient
<450W power supply.
Another aspect: Buying a 120 bucks power supply that is 1.2% more
efficient than a 60 bucks one is just a waste of money.
sandreas wrote 11 hours 1 min ago:
Understandable... Well, the bottleneck for a Proxmox Server often
is RAM - sometimes CPU cores (to share between VMs). This might not
be the case for a NAS-only device.
Another upgrade path is to keep the case, fans, cooling solution
and only switch Mainboard, CPU and RAM.
I'm also not a huge fan of non x64 devices, because they still
often require jumping through some hoops regarding boot order,
external device boot or power loss struggle.
fnord77 wrote 12 hours 27 min ago:
these little boxes are perfect for my home
My use case is a backup server for my macs and cold storage for
movies.
6x2Tb drives will give me a 9Tb raid-5 for $809 ($100 each for the
drives, $209 for the nas).
Very quiet so I can have it in my living room plugged into my TV. <
10W power.
I have no room for a big noisy server.
UltraSane wrote 9 hours 16 min ago:
Storing backups and movies on NVMe ssds is just a waste of money.
sandreas wrote 2 hours 5 min ago:
Absolutely. I don't store movies at all but if I would, I would
add a USB-based solution that could be turned off via shelly plug
/ tasmota remotely.
sandreas wrote 11 hours 18 min ago:
While I get your point about size, I'd not use RAID-5 for my
personal homelab. I'd also say that 6x2TB drives are not the
optimal solution for low power consumption. You're also missing out
server quality BIOS, Design/Stability/x64 and remote management.
However, not bad.
While my Server is quite big compared to a "mini" device, it's
silent. No CPU Fan only 120mm case fans spinning around 500rpm,
maybe 900rpm on load - hardly noticable. I've also a completely
passive backup solution with a Streacom FC5, but I don't really
trust it for the chipsets, so I also installed a low rpm 120mm fan.
How did you fit 6 drives in a "mini" case? Using Asus Flashstor or
beelink?
j45 wrote 4 hours 32 min ago:
I agreed with this generally until learning the long way why RAID
5 minimum is the only way to have some peace of mind and always a
nas with at least 1-2 extra bays than you need.
Storage is easier as an appliance that just runs.
Dylan16807 wrote 5 hours 39 min ago:
> I'd not use RAID-5 for my personal homelab.
What would you use instead?
ZFS is better than raw RAID, but 1 parity per 5 data disks is a
pretty good match for the reliability you can expect out of any
one machine.
Much more important than better parity is having backups. Maybe
more important than having any parity, though if you have no
parity please use JBOD and not RAID-0.
timc3 wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
I would run 2 or more parity disks always. I have had disks
fail and rebuilding with only one parity drive is scary (have
seen rebuilds go bad because a second drive failed whilst
rebuilding).
But agree about backups.
Dylan16807 wrote 1 hour 45 min ago:
Were those arrays doing regular scrubs, so that they
experience rebuild-equivalent load every month or two and
it's not a sudden shock to them?
If your odds of disk failure in a rebuild are "only" 10x
normal failure rate, and it takes a week, 5 disks will all
survive that week 98% of the time. That's plenty for a NAS.
sandreas wrote 2 hours 38 min ago:
I'd almost always use RAID-1 or if I had > 4 disks, maybe
RAID-6. RAID-5 seems very cost effective at first, but if you
loose a drive the probability of losing another one in the
restoring process is pretty high (I don't have the numbers, but
I researched that years ago). The disk-replacement process
produces very high load on the non defective disks and the more
you have the riskier the process. Another aspect is that 5
drives draw way more power than 2 and you cannot (easily)
upgrade the capacity, although ZFS offers a feature for
RAID5-expansion.
Since RAID is not meant for backup, but for reliability, losing
a drive while restoring will kill your storage pool and having
to restore the whole data from a backup (e.g. from a cloud
drive)is probably not what you want, since it takes time where
the device is offline. If you rely on RAID5 without having a
backup you're done.
So I have a RAID1, which is simple, reliable and easy to
maintain. Replacing 2 drives with higher capacity ones and
increasing the storage is easy.
epistasis wrote 10 hours 9 min ago:
I'm interested in learning more about your setup. What sort of
system did you put together for $350? Is it a normal ATX case? I
really like the idea of running proxmox but I don't know how to
get something cheap!
sandreas wrote 2 hours 32 min ago:
My current config:
Fujitsu D3417-B12
Intel Xeon 1225
64GB ecc
WD SN850x 2TB
mATX case
Pico PSU 150
For backup I use a 2TB enterprise HDD and ZFS send
For snapshotting i use zfs-auto-snapshot
So really nothing recommendable for buying today. You could go
for this [1] Or an old Fujitsu Celsius W580 Workstation with a
Bojiadafast ATX Power Supply Adapter, if you need harddisks.
Unfortunately there is no silver bullet these days. The old
stuff is... well too old or no longer available and the new
stuff is either to pricey, lacks features (ECC and 2.5G mainly)
or to power hungry.
A year ago there were bargains for Gigabyte MC12-LE0 board
available for < 50bucks, but nowadays these cost about 250
again. These boards also had the problem of drawing too much
power for an ultra low power homelab.
If I HAD to buy one today, I'd probably go for a Ryzen Pro 5700
with a gaming board (like ASUS ROG Strix B550-F Gaming) with
ECC RAM, which is supported on some boards.
[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006369887180.html
samhclark wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
I think you're right generally, but I wanna call out the ODROID H4
models as an exception to a lot of what you said. They are mostly
upgradable (SODIMM RAM, SATA ports, M.2 2280 slots), and it does
support in-band ECC which kinda checks the ECC box. They've got a
Mini-ITX adapter for $15 so it can fit into existing cases too.
No IPMI and not very many NVME slots. So I think you're right that a
good mATX board could be better.
geek_at wrote 12 hours 40 min ago:
Not sure about the odroid but I got myself the nas kit from
friendly elec. With the largest ram it was about 150 bucks and
comes with 2,5g ethernet and 4 NVME slots. No fan and keeps fairly
cool even under load.
Running it with encrypted zfs volumes and even with a 5bay 3.5 Inch
HDD dock attached via USB
[1]: https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/CM3588_NAS_Ki...
sandreas wrote 12 hours 44 min ago:
Well, if you would like to go mini (with ECC and 2.5G) you could
take a look at this one: [1] Not totally upgradable, but at least
pretty low cost and modern with an optional SATA + NVMe combination
for Proxmox. Shovel in an enterprise SATA and a consumer 8TB WD
SN850x and this should work pretty good. Even Optane is supported.
IPMI could be replaced with NanoKVM or JetKVM...
[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006369887180.html
a012 wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
That looks pretty slick with a standard hsf for the CPU, thanks
for sharing
herf wrote 14 hours 8 min ago:
Which SSDs do people rely on? Considering PLP (power loss protection),
write endurance/DWPD (no QLC), and other bugs that affect ZFS
especially? It is hard to find options that do these things well for
<$100/TB, with lower-end datacenter options (e.g., Samsung PM9A3)
costing maybe double what you see in a lot of builds.
privatelypublic wrote 13 hours 41 min ago:
QLC isn't an issue for consumer NAS- are 'you' seriously going to
write 160GB/day, every day?
magicalhippo wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
QLC have quite the write performance cliff though, which could be
an issue during use or when rebuilding the array.
Just something to be aware of.
dwood_dev wrote 4 hours 22 min ago:
The 2.5Gbe network writes against a RAID-Z1 config of 4 drives
puts the sustained write speed below that of most QLC drives.
Recovery from a lost drive would be slower, for sure.
nightfly wrote 13 hours 57 min ago:
ZFS isn't more effected by those, your just more likely to notice
them with ZFS. You'll probably never notice write endurance issues on
a home NAS
7e wrote 14 hours 12 min ago:
These need remote management capabilities (IPMI) to not be a huge PITA.
geerlingguy wrote 7 hours 55 min ago:
A JetKVM, NanoKVM, or the like is useful if you want to add on some
capability.
bongodongobob wrote 11 hours 49 min ago:
I haven't even thought about my NAS in years. No idea what you're
talking about.
yonatan8070 wrote 13 hours 49 min ago:
How often do you use IPMI on a server? I have a regular desktop
running Proxmox, and I haven't had to plug in a monitor since I first
installed it like 2 years ago
al_borland wrote 14 hours 56 min ago:
I’ve been thinking about moving from SSDs for my NAS to solid state.
The drive are so loud, all the time, it’s very annoying.
My first experience with these cheap mini PCs was with a Beelink and it
was very positive and makes me question the longevity of the hardware.
For a NAS, that’s important to me.
leptons wrote 12 hours 28 min ago:
> moving from SSDs for my NAS to solid state.
SSD = Solid State Drive
So you're moving from solid state to solid state?
al_borland wrote 10 hours 58 min ago:
That should have been HDD. Typo. Seems too late to edit.
chime wrote 14 hours 37 min ago:
I've been using a QNAP TBS-464 [1] for 4 years now with excellent
results. I have 4x 4TB NVMe drives and get about 11TB usable after
RAID. It gets slightly warm but I have it in my media cabinet with a
UPS, Mikrotik router, PoE switches, and ton of other devices. Zero
complaints about this setup.
The entire cabinet uses under 1kwh/day, costing me under $40/year
here, compared to my previous Synology and home-made NAS which used
300-500w, costing $300+/year. Sure I paid about $1500 in total when I
bought the QNAP and the NVMe drives but just the electricity savings
made the expense worth it, let alone the performance, features etc.
1.
[1]: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-464
al_borland wrote 13 hours 54 min ago:
Thanks, I’ll give it a look. I’m running a Synology right now.
It only has 2 drives, so just swapping those out for SSDs would
cost as much as a whole 4xNVMe setup, as I have 8TB HDDs in there
now.
jbverschoor wrote 14 hours 41 min ago:
HDD -> SSD I assume
For me it’s more and random access times
whatever1 wrote 15 hours 0 min ago:
Question regarding these mini pcs: how do you connect them to plain old
hard drives ? Is thunderbolt / usb these days reliable enough to run
24/7 without disconnects like an onboard sata?
TiredOfLife wrote 14 hours 27 min ago:
I have been running usb hdds 24/7 connected to raspberry pi as a nas
for 10 years without problems
blargthorwars wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
I've run a massive farm (2 petabytes) of ZFS on FreeBSD servers with
Zraid over consumer USB for about fifteen years and haven't had a
problem: directly attaching to the motherboard USB ports and using
good but boring controllers on the drives like the WD Elements
series.
michaelt wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
Would you not simply buy a regular NAS?
Why buy a tiny, m.2 only mini-NAS if your need is better met by a
vanilla 2-bay NAS?
x0x0 wrote 13 hours 12 min ago:
power regularly hits 50 cents a kilowatt hour where I live. Most
of those seem to treat power like its free.
projektfu wrote 14 hours 27 min ago:
Good question. I imagine for the silence and low power usage
without needing huge amounts of storage. That said, I own an n100
dual 3.5 bay + m.2 mini PC that can function as a NAS or as
anything and I think it's pretty neat for the price.
indemnity wrote 10 hours 16 min ago:
Noise is definitely an issue.
I have an 8 drive NAS running 7200 RPM drives, which is on a wall
mounted shelf drilled into the studs.
On the other side of that wall is my home office.
I had to put the NAS on speaker springs [1] to not go crazy from
the hum :)
[1]: https://www.amazon.com.au/Nobsound-Aluminum-Isolation-Am...
asalahli wrote 13 hours 43 min ago:
This sounds exactly like what I'm looking. Care to share the
brand&model?
projektfu wrote 11 hours 28 min ago:
AOOSTAR R1
monster_truck wrote 14 hours 37 min ago:
The last sata controller (onboard or otherwise) that I had with known
data corruption and connection issues is old enough to drive now
jeffbee wrote 14 hours 48 min ago:
I've never heard of these disconnects. The OWC ThunderBay works well.
jkortufor wrote 14 hours 31 min ago:
I have experienced them - I have a B650 AM5 motherboard and if I
connect a Orico USB HDD enclosure to the fastest USB ports, the
ones comming directly from the AMD CPU (yes, it's a thing now),
after 5-10 min the HDD just disappears from the system. Doesn't
happen on the other USB ports.
jeffbee wrote 14 hours 24 min ago:
Well, AMD makes a good core but there are reasons that Intel is
preferred by some users in some applications, and one of those
reasons is that the peripheral devices on Intel platforms tend to
work.
layer8 wrote 14 hours 32 min ago:
For that money it can make more sense to get a UGreen DXP4800 with
built-in N100: [1] You can install a third-party OS on it.
[1]: https://nas.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-nasync-dxp4800-nas-...
devwastaken wrote 15 hours 4 min ago:
i want a NAS i can puf 4tb nvme’s in and a 12tb hdd running backup
every night. with ability to shove a 50gbps sfp card in it so i can
truly have a detached storage solution.
gorkish wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
The lack of highspeed networking on any small system is completely
and totally insane. I have come to hate 2.5gbps for the hard stall it
has caused on consumer networking with such a passion that it is
difficult to convey. You ship a system with USB5 on the front and
your networking offering is 3.5 orders of magnitude slower? What good
is the cloud if you have to drink it through a straw?
lostlogin wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
10gbps would be a good start. The lack of wifi is mentioned as a
downside, but do many people want that on a NAS?
jbverschoor wrote 14 hours 39 min ago:
Yeah that’s what I want too.
I don’t necessarily need a mirror of most data, some I do prefer,
but that’s small.
I just want a backup (with history) of the data-SSD. The backup can
be a single drive + perhaps remote storage
lostlogin wrote 13 hours 22 min ago:
Would you really want the backup on a single disk? Or is this
backing up data that is also versioned on the SSDs?
dwood_dev wrote 15 hours 4 min ago:
I love reviews like these. I'm a fan of the N100 series for what they
are in bringing low power x86 small PCs to a wide variety of
applications.
One curiosity for @geerlingguy, does the Beelink work over USB-C PD? I
doubt it, but would like to know for sure.
geerlingguy wrote 14 hours 24 min ago:
That, I did not test. But as it's not listed in specs or shown in any
of their documentation, I don't think so.
moondev wrote 13 hours 3 min ago:
Looks like it only draws 45w which could allow this to be powered
over POE++ with a splitter, but it has an integrated AC input and
PSU - that's impressive regardless considering how small it is but
not set up for PD or POE
amelius wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
What types of distributed/network filesystem are people running
nowadays on Linux?
sekh60 wrote 13 hours 6 min ago:
I use Ceph. 5 nodes, 424TiB of raw space so far.
geerlingguy wrote 15 hours 11 min ago:
Ceph or MooseFS are the two that I've seen most popular. All
networked FS have drawbacks, I used to run a lot of Gluster, and it
certainly added a few grey hairs.
bee_rider wrote 15 hours 24 min ago:
Should a mini-NAS be considered a new type of thing with a new design
goal? He seems to be describing about a desktop worth of storage (6TB),
but always available on the network and less power consuming than a
desktop.
This seems useful. But it seems quite different from his previous
(80TB) NAS.
What is the idle power draw of an SSD anyway? I guess they usually have
a volatile ram cache of some sort built in (is that right?) so it must
not be zero…
jeffbee wrote 12 hours 34 min ago:
> less power consuming than a desktop
Not really seeing that in these minis. Either the devices under test
haven't been optimized for low power, or their Linux installs have
non-optimal configs for low power. My NUC 12 draws less than 4W,
measured at the wall, when operating without an attached display and
with Wi-Fi but no wired network link. All three of the boxes in the
review use at least twice as much power at idle.
privatelypublic wrote 13 hours 39 min ago:
With APSD the idle draw of a SSD is in the range of low tens of
milliwatts.
CharlesW wrote 13 hours 51 min ago:
> Should a mini-NAS be considered a new type of thing with a new
design goal?
Small/portable low-power SSD-based NASs have been commercialized
since 2016 or so. Some people call them "NASbooks", although I don't
think that term ever gained critical MAS (little joke there).
Examples: [1] , [2] ,
[1]: https://www.qnap.com/en/product/tbs-464
[2]: https://www.qnap.com/en/product/tbs-h574tx
[3]: https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=80
layer8 wrote 14 hours 19 min ago:
HDD-based NASes are used for all kinds of storage amounts, from as
low as 4TB to hundreds of TB. The SSD NASes aren’t really much
different in use case, just limited in storage amount by available
(and affordable) drive capacities, while needing less space, being
quieter, but having a higher cost per TB.
transpute wrote 14 hours 32 min ago:
> Should a mini-NAS be considered a new type of thing with a new
design goal?
- Warm storage between mobile/tablet and cold NAS
- Sidecar server of functions disabled on other OSes
- Personal context cache for LLMs and agents
transpute wrote 15 hours 29 min ago:
Intel N150 is the first consumer Atom [1] CPU (in 15 years!) to include
TXT/DRTM for measured system launch with owner-managed keys. At every
system boot, this can confirm that immutable components (anything from
BIOS+config to the kernel to immutable partitions) have the expected
binary hash/tree.
TXT/DRTM can enable AEM (Anti Evil Maid) with Qubes, SystemGuard with
Windows IoT and hopefully future support from other operating systems.
It would be a valuable feature addition to Proxmox, FreeNAS and
OPNsense.
Some (many?) N150 devices from Topton (China) ship without Bootguard
fused, which _may_ enable coreboot to be ported to those platforms.
Hopefully ODROID (Korea) will ship N150 devices. Then we could have
fanless N150 devices with coreboot and DRTM for less-insecure [2]
routers and storage. [1] Gracemont (E-core): [1] | [2] (Intel Austin
architect, 2021) [2] "Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to
detect motion", 400 comments,
[1]: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/gracemont-revenge-of-the-atom-cor...
[2]: https://youtu.be/agUwkj1qTCs
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726#44427986
reanimus wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
Where are you seeing devices without Bootguard fused? I'd be very
curious to get my hands on some of those...
transpute wrote 7 hours 46 min ago:
As a Schrödinger-like property, it may vary by observer and not be
publicly documented.. One could start with a commercial product
that ships with coreboot, then try to find identical hardware from
an upstream ODM. A search for "bootguard" or "coreboot" on
servethehome forums, odroid/hardkernel forums, phoronix or even HN,
may be helpful.
jauntywundrkind wrote 15 hours 35 min ago:
Would be nice to see what those little N100 / N150 (or big brother N305
/ N350) can do with all that NVMe. Raw throughput is pretty whatever
but hypothetically if the CPU isn't too gating, there's some
interesting IOps potential.
Really hoping we see 25/40GbaseT start to show up, so the lower market
segments like this can do 10Gbit. Hopefully we see some embedded Ryzens
(or other more PCIe willing contendors) in this space, at a value
oriented price. But I'm not holding my breath.
dwood_dev wrote 15 hours 21 min ago:
The problem quickly becomes PCIe lanes. The N100/150/305 only have 9
PCIe 3.0 lanes. 5Gbe is fine, but to go to 10Gbe you need x2.
Until there is something in this class with PCIe 4.0, I think we're
close to maxing out the IO of these devices.
geerlingguy wrote 15 hours 9 min ago:
Not only the lanes, but putting through more than 6 Gbps of IO on
multiple PCIe devices on the N150 bogs things down. It's only a
little faster than something like a Raspberry Pi, there are a lot
of little IO bottlenecks (for high speed, that is, it's great for
2.5 Gbps) if you do anything that hits CPU.
lostlogin wrote 13 hours 24 min ago:
This is what baffles me - 2.5gbps.
I want smaller, cooler, quieter, but isn’t the key attribute of
SSDs their speed? A raid array of SSDs can surely achieve vastly
better than 2.5gbps.
jauntywundrkind wrote 9 hours 44 min ago:
Even if the throughput isn't high, it sure is nice having the
instant response time & amazing random access performance of a
ssd.
2TB ssd are super cheap. But most systems don't have the
expandability to add a bunch of them. So I fully get the
incentive here, being able to add multiple drives. Even if
you're not reaping additional speed.
jrockway wrote 11 hours 50 min ago:
2.5Gbps is selected for price reasons. Not only is the NIC
cheap, but so is the networking hardware.
But yeah, if you want fast storage just stick the SSD in your
workstation, not on a mini PC hanging off your 2.5Gbps network.
p_ing wrote 11 hours 54 min ago:
A single SSD can (or at least NVMe can). You have to question
whether or not you need it -- what are you doing that you would
go line-speed a large portion of time that the time savings are
worth it. Or it's just a toy, totally cool too.
4 7200 RPM HDDs in RAID 5 (like WD Red Pro) can saturate a
1Gbps link at ~110MBps over SMB 3. But that comes with the heat
and potential reliability issues of spinning disks.
I have seen consumer SSDs, namely Samsung 8xx EVO drives have
significant latency issues in a RAID config where saturating
the drives caused 1+ second latency. This was on Windows Server
2019 using either a SAS controller or JBOD + Storage Spaces.
Replacing the drives with used Intel drives resolved the issue.
lostlogin wrote 9 hours 39 min ago:
My use is a bit into the cool-toy category. I like having VMs
where the NAS has the VMs and the backups, and like having
the server connect to the NAS to access the VMs.
Probably a silly arrangement but I like it.
dwood_dev wrote 14 hours 53 min ago:
The CPU bottleneck would be resolved by the Pentium Gold 8505,
but it still has the same 9 lanes of PCIe 3.0.
I only came across the existence of this CPU a few months ago, it
is Nearly the same price class as a N100, but has a full Alder
Lake P-Core in addition. It is a shame it seems to only be
available in six port routers, then again, that is probably a
pretty optimal application for it.
Havoc wrote 15 hours 36 min ago:
I've been running one of these quad nvme mini-NAS for a while. They're
a good compromise if you can live with no ECC. With some DIY
shenanigans they can even run fanless
If you're running on consumer nvmes then mirrored is probably a better
idea than raidz though. Write amplification can easily shred consumer
drives.
turnsout wrote 14 hours 17 min ago:
I’m a TrueNAS/FreeNAS user, currently running an ECC system. The
traditional wisdom is that ECC is a must-have for ZFS. What do you
think? Is this outdated?
seltzered_ wrote 10 hours 22 min ago:
[1] has an argument for it with an update from 2024.
[1]: https://danluu.com/why-ecc/
Havoc wrote 12 hours 59 min ago:
Ultimately comes down to how important the data is to you. It's not
really a technical question but one of risk tolerance
matja wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
ECC is a must-have if you want to minimize the risk of corruption,
but that is true for any filesystem.
Sun (and now Oracle) officially recommended using ECC ever since it
was intended to be an enterprise product running on 24/7 servers,
where it makes sense that anything that is going to be cached in
RAM for long periods is protected by ECC.
In that sense it was a "must-have", as business-critical functions
require that guarantee.
Now that you can use ZFS on a number of operating systems, on many
different architectures, even a Raspberry Pi, the
business-critical-only use-case is not as prevalent.
ZFS doesn't intrinsically require ECC but it does trust that the
memory functions correctly which you have the best chance of
achieving by using ECC.
magicalhippo wrote 13 hours 12 min ago:
Been running without for 15+ on my NAS boxes, built using my
previous desktop hardware fitted with NAS disks.
They're on 24/ and run monthly scrubs, as well as monthly checksum
verification of my backup images, and not noticed any issues so
far.
I had some correctable errors which got fixed when changing SATA
cable a few times, and some from a disk that after 7 years of 24/7
developed a small run of bad sectors.
That said, you got ECC so you should be able to monitor corrected
memory errors.
Matt Ahrens himself (one of the creators of ZFS) had said there's
nothing particular about ZFS:
There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use
of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT,
NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as
if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this
risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY
flag (zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in
memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the
window of vulnerability from a memory error.
I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM.
Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as
ZFS.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&...
stoltzmann wrote 13 hours 21 min ago:
That traditional wisdom is wrong. ECC is a must-have for any
computer. The only reason people think ECC is mandatory for ZFS is
because it exposes errors due to inherent checksumming and most
other filesystems don't, even if they suffer from the same
problems.
HappMacDonald wrote 11 hours 54 min ago:
I'm curious if it would make sense for write caches in RAM to
just include a CRC32 on every block, to be verified as it gets
written to disk.
doubled112 wrote 11 hours 46 min ago:
Don't you have to read that data into RAM before you can
generate the CRC? Which means without ECC it could get
silently corrupted on the way to the cache?
adgjlsfhk1 wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
that's just as true with ecc as without
evanjrowley wrote 14 hours 0 min ago:
One way to look at it is ECC has recently become more affordable
due to In-Band ECC (IBECC) providing ECC-like functionality for a
lot of newer power efficient Intel CPUs. [1] Not every new CPU has
it, for example, the Intel N95, N97, N100, N200, i3-N300, and
i3-N305 all have it, but the N150 doesn't!
It's kind of disappointing that the low power NAS devices reviewed
here, the only one with support for IBECC had a limited BIOS that
most likely was missing this option. The ODROID H4 series, CWWK NAS
products, AOOSTAR, and various N100 ITX motherboards all support
it.
[1]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IGEN6-IBECC-Driver
cuu508 wrote 16 hours 0 min ago:
What are the non-Intel mini NAS options for lower idle power?
I know of FriendlyElec CM3588, are there others?
transpute wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
QNAP TS435XeU 1U short-depth NAS based on Marvell CN913x (SoC
successor to Armada A388) with 4xSATA, 2xM.2, 2x10GbE, optional ECC
RAM and upstream Linux kernel support,
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43760248
koeng wrote 16 hours 4 min ago:
Are there any mini NAS with ECC ram nowadays? I recall that being my
personal limiting factor
qwertox wrote 15 hours 26 min ago:
Minisforum N5 Pro Nas has up to 96 GB of ECC RAM [1] [2] no RAM
1.399€
16GB RAM 1.459€
48GB RAM 1.749€
96GB RAM 2.119€
96GB DDR5 SO-DIMM costs around 200€ to 280€ in Germany. [3] I
wonder if that 128GB kit would work, as the CPU supports up to 256GB
[4] I can't force the page to show USD prices.
[1]: https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro
[2]: https://store.minisforum.com/en-de/products/minisforum-n5-n5...
[3]: https://geizhals.de/?cat=ramddr3&xf=15903_DDR5~15903_SO-DIMM...
[4]: https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen-pro/...
lmz wrote 8 hours 8 min ago:
Note the RAM list linked above doesn't show ECC SODIMM options.
wyager wrote 14 hours 36 min ago:
Is this "full" ECC, or just the baseline improved ECC that all DDR5
has?
Either way, on my most recent NAS build, I didn't bother with a
server-grade motherboard, figuring that the standard consumer DDR5
ECC was probably good enough.
qwertox wrote 11 hours 59 min ago:
This is full ECC, the CPU supports it (AMD Pro variant).
DDR5 ECC is not good enough. What if you have faulty RAM and ECC
is constantly correcting it without you knowing it? There's no
value in that. You need the OS to be informed so that you are
aware of it. It also does not protect errors which occur between
the RAM and the CPU.
This is similar to HDDs using ECC. Without SMART you'd have a
problem, but part of SMART is that it allows you to get a count
of ECC-corrected errors so that you can be aware of the state of
the drive.
True ECC takes the role of SMART in regards of RAM, it's just
that it only reports that: ECC-corrected errors.
On a NAS, where you likely store important data, true ECC does
add value.
layer8 wrote 14 hours 11 min ago:
The DDR5 on-die ECC doesn’t report memory errors back to the
CPU, which is why you would normally want ECC RAM in the first
place. Unlike traditional side-band ECC, it also doesn’t
protect the memory transfers between CPU and RAM. DDR5 requires
the on-die ECC in order to still remain reliable in face of its
chip density and speed.
Havoc wrote 15 hours 35 min ago:
One of the arm ones is yes. Can't for the life of me remember which
though - sorry - either something in bananapi or lattepanda part of
universe I think
vbezhenar wrote 15 hours 47 min ago:
HP Microservers.
dontlaugh wrote 15 hours 40 min ago:
I got myself a gen8, they’re quite cheap. They do have ECC RAM
and take 3.5” hard drives.
At some point though, SSDs will beat hard drives on total price
(including electricity). I’d like a small and efficient ECC
option for then.
brookst wrote 15 hours 52 min ago:
The Aoostar WTR max is pretty beefy, supports 5 nvme and 6 hard
drives, and up to 128GB of ECC ram. But it’s $700 bare bones, much
more than these devices in the article.
Takennickname wrote 15 hours 30 min ago:
Aoostar WTR series is one change away from being the PERFECT home
server/nas. Passing the storage controller IOMMU to a VM is finicky
at best. Still better than the vast majority of devices that don't
allow it at all. But if they do that, I'm in homelab heaven.
Unfortunately, the current iteration cannot due to a hardware
limitation in the AMD chipset they're using.
brookst wrote 15 hours 11 min ago:
Good info! Is it the same limitation on WTR pro and max? The max
is an 8845hsv versus the 5825u in the pro.
amluto wrote 15 hours 56 min ago:
Yes, but not particularly cheap:
[1]: https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=89
MarkSweep wrote 15 hours 22 min ago:
Asustor has some cheaper options that support ECC. Though not as
cheap as those in the OP article.
FLASHSTOR 6 Gen2 (FS6806X) $1000 - [1] LOCKERSTOR 4 Gen3 (AS6804T)
$1300 -
[1]: https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=90
[2]: https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=86
<- back to front page
You are viewing proxied material from codevoid.de. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.