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Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

(www.jeffgeerling.com)
433 points ingve | 3 comments | 04 Jul 25 15:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.68s | 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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Dylan16807 ◴[05 Jul 25 02:20 UTC] No.44469640[source]▶
> 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.

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timc3 ◴[05 Jul 25 05:29 UTC] No.44470281[source]▶
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.

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Dylan16807 ◴[05 Jul 25 06:14 UTC] No.44470465[source]▶
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.

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dwedge ◴[05 Jul 25 10:54 UTC] No.44471796[source]▶
If the drives are the same age and large parts of the drive haven't been read from for a long time until the rebuild you might find it already failed. Anecdotally around 12 years ago the chances of a second disk failing during a raid 5 rebuild (in our setup) was probably more like 10-20%
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1. Dylan16807 ◴[05 Jul 25 11:17 UTC] No.44471914[source]▶
> and large parts of the drive haven't been read from for a long time

Hence the first sentence of my three sentence post.

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2. dwedge ◴[05 Jul 25 13:15 UTC] No.44472596[source]▶
If I wanted to deal with snark I'd reply to people on Reddit.
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3. Dylan16807 ◴[05 Jul 25 19:58 UTC] No.44475109[source]▶
My goal isn't to be rude, but when you skip over a critical part of what I'm saying it causes a communication issue. Are you correcting my numbers, or intentionally giving numbers for a completely different scenario, or something in between? Is it none of those and you weren't taking my comment seriously enough to read 50 words? The way you replied made it hard to tell.

So I made a simple comment to point out the conflict, a little bit rude but not intended to escalate the level of rudeness, and easier for both of us than writing out a whole big thing.