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Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

(www.jeffgeerling.com)
429 points ingve | 5 comments | 04 Jul 25 15:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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sandreas ◴[04 Jul 25 18:03 UTC] No.44466616[source]▶
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

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1. samhclark ◴[04 Jul 25 18:33 UTC] No.44466835[source]▶
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.

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2. sandreas ◴[04 Jul 25 19:15 UTC] No.44467114[source]▶
Well, if you would like to go mini (with ECC and 2.5G) you could take a look at this one:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006369887180.html

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...

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3. geek_at ◴[04 Jul 25 19:19 UTC] No.44467141[source]▶
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

https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/CM3588_NAS_Kit

4. a012 ◴[05 Jul 25 05:12 UTC] No.44470227[source]▶
That looks pretty slick with a standard hsf for the CPU, thanks for sharing
5. ilkhan4 ◴[05 Jul 25 12:32 UTC] No.44472357[source]▶
You can get a 1 -> 4 M.2 adapter for these as well which would give each one a 1x PCIe lane (same as all these other boards). If you still want spinning rust, these also have built-in power for those and SATA ports so you only need a 12-19v power supply. No idea why these aren't more popular as a basis for a NAS.