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Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

(www.jeffgeerling.com)
429 points ingve | 1 comments | 04 Jul 25 15:21 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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fnord77 ◴[04 Jul 25 19:32 UTC] No.44467230[source]▶
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.

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sandreas ◴[04 Jul 25 20:41 UTC] No.44467725[source]▶
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?

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epistasis ◴[04 Jul 25 21:50 UTC] No.44468123{3}[source]▶
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!
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1. sandreas ◴[05 Jul 25 05:27 UTC] No.44470274{4}[source]▶
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

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

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.