Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

chrisbergeron.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 102 posts

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#21

Post by jeroenhd »

michelb wrote: post #19
definitelyhuman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari 14.1.2 on latest Catalina doesn't render

Only safari on big sur has webp support.

That's very strange. Is this a versioning problem (i.e. Catalina not being supported anymore?) or is there some kind of hardware restriction?

From what I can find, Catalina should still be supported for more than a year from now, right?

Edit: well, that's bizarre. Caniuse.com [0] lists the same restriction, WebP is only available from Big Sur onwards. And then people wonder why nobody likes developing for Safari.

[0]: https://www.caniuse.com/?search=webp

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#22

Post by reacharavindh »

minhazm wrote: post #7
reacharavindh wrote: post #3

Not to take away anything from the fun of figuring out Thunderbolt on Linux, and such. But, I wonder if a NAS with a 40 Gbps or even 100Gbps NIC hooked up to a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter would achieve a better result without extra effort.

The fastest thunderbolt to ethernet adapter I could find is 25 Gbps and it's $1500. 10 Gbps ones are in the $200+ range as well.

True. I assumed it was a simple adaptor for TB3 to 40Gbps Ethernet or atleast QSFP+ Since TB also advertises 40 Gbps, but looks like expensive niche. At $1500, you might as well spend time to figure out how to get Linux to work better with Thunderbolt card.

For other devices in the network that do not impose Thunderbolt though, Melanox 40G NICs are surprisingly cheap.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#23

Post by vitejose »

devonkim wrote: post #20
whalesalad wrote: post #18

Just yesterday I was thinking how badly I want an obscenely fast local datastore for Docker. I am managing a handful of clients right now who are all using Docker containers for their microservice environments and my local machine runs out of disk daily. What I really want is lightning quick network storage, but I don't think it would be feasible to roll out 10g networking in my current rental home.

10gbe can be done over RJ45 with a direct cable connection and is something I've done before in a pinch between my personal NAS and a client machine (just be careful about your storage protocol because NFS has its pros and cons just like iSCSI and FCoE, and with macOS as a client you're likely in for a Bad Time like I did).

Out of curiosity, what issues did you run into with NFS on macOS? I'm looking into building a NAS for a network of macOS, Linux, and BSD machines and figured NFS would be my first choice.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#24

Post by jeffbee »

reacharavindh wrote: post #10
jeffbee wrote: post #5

Where by "ultra fast" it is meant that it is much slower than a directly-attached SSD that occupies the same port.

Local storage and Networked storage always have their places. Local solid state storage almost always gets you better performance because you negate the overhead of network. Unless, you’re talking fancy arrays connected to saturate 100G NICs. Local storage falls apart the moment you need that storage accessible from another machine…

This doesn't say anything about how such storage would be accessed by the mac and some other clients at the same time. It literally just runs iperf over tb. As a matter of architecture it leaves the question of whether it would be preferable to directly attach the storage to the Mac and export it to the rest of the network from there.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#26

Post by cbushko »

whalesalad wrote: post #18

Just yesterday I was thinking how badly I want an obscenely fast local datastore for Docker. I am managing a handful of clients right now who are all using Docker containers for their microservice environments and my local machine runs out of disk daily. What I really want is lightning quick network storage, but I don't think it would be feasible to roll out 10g networking in my current rental home.

Would running something like the docker proxy below on an old laptop help?

  TLDR: A caching proxy for Docker; allows centralized management of (multiple) registries and their authentication; caches images from any registry. Caches the potentially huge blob/layer requests (for bandwidth/time savings), and optionally caches manifest requests ("pulls") to avoid rate-limiting.
https://github.com/rpardini/docker-registry-proxy

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#27

Post by renewiltord »

jeffbee wrote: post #5

Where by "ultra fast" it is meant that it is much slower than a directly-attached SSD that occupies the same port.

Well, yes, that is implied by the fact that it says “NAS” in the title.

In general, you can usually do faster local than over the network. People use a NAS for other reasons.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#29

Post by kilroy123 »

whalesalad wrote: post #18

Just yesterday I was thinking how badly I want an obscenely fast local datastore for Docker. I am managing a handful of clients right now who are all using Docker containers for their microservice environments and my local machine runs out of disk daily. What I really want is lightning quick network storage, but I don't think it would be feasible to roll out 10g networking in my current rental home.

Just curious what size is your hard drive?

I had this pain with my last macbook. I ALWAYS ran out of disk space. Never again! I went with a 1 TB drive for my M1.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#30

Post by dylan604 »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #14
dylan604 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That SSD has 0 redundancy so you're trading the purpose of the NAS by going for speed. If that's what you want, then you're wasting time looking at NAS equipment anyways. So what's your point?

Most SSDs have a lot of redundancy in the form of multiple flash chips, it's just not exposed to you, the user, by the controller chipset. There are also PCI-E x16 with multiple NVMe slots. There's nothing stopping some company from making something similar for Thunderbolt. And I guess the cost is too high and the connectors would be too bulky, but it would be nice to have something like a SODIMM for flash that separ…

Are we really comparing the "redundancy" of an SSD internal workings to a NAS? You're reaching really far for that. Whatever "redundancy" an SSD has is whatever it needs just to present a single instance of that data to you. Sounds pretty damn ineffecient, but if that's what it takes to reliably get 1200MB/s speeds I'm okay with it for situations where I need that.

The redundancy a NAS can provide means losing an entire drive (or more depending on config) in the unit without data loss. Even with that failed drive, the data is still accessible. The failed thing can then even be replaced and the system can be brought back to the normal full redundant state. Your "redundancy" of an SSD doesn't allow for that to happen.

I feel like I'm actually feeding trolls with this

Post reply on HN