A litter pricey, great concepts. For me I will just use a rpi4 with two usb drives for a poor man NAS, that just backup stuff and nothing more, I can do it with less than $60(including housing, 2GB version, fanless)
PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
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Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#12A litter pricey, great concepts. For me I will just use a rpi4 with two usb drives for a poor man NAS, that just backup stuff and nothing more, I can do it with less than $60(including housing, 2GB version, fanless)
I agree it is a little pricey for something that doesn't come complete with the SOC. I would rather use something like the ODROID-HC4[1]. It isn't as fancy as this or have as broad of support as the RPi, but it is $80.
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#13Just finished watching your video on it. I'll be curious to see how the quality improves on the production units. I don't think I'll need 2 8TB drives for it lol but this seems to be one of the better RPI NAS form factors so far.
Heh, the 8 TB drives was more for show than anything else—I actually have them in mind for a separate project but it's more fun saying 16 TB SSD than 4 TB... plus one of my 2 TB Crucial SSDs seems to have burned itself out this week so I guess it's two good things!
I hope they make the 3.5" model too, though—it would be more cost effective (and fit the Pi's performance better) to use 3.5" HDDs that are a lot cheaper per GB, and could still easily saturate the 1 Gbps network jack.
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#14PiBox is built by us, KubeSail! We're a YC S19 company that focuses on home-hosting and shipping open-source software to customers.
Happy to answer any questions!
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#15I was hoping for a bit better performance. Any suggestions for similar that could max out 4-5 drives, maybe add a M.2/U.2 for caching (or 2), and handle 2.5 gbit ethernet?
If you want that many drives you’re better off with a proper NAS and a RAID setup imho. If you want an M.2 drive for caching, you’re basically in Synology territory if you throw your other requirements on top. Sure, it’s not running an OS flavored for the Pi, but everything else you want is covered.
Ditto—though I'm also testing the Radxa Taco, which is hopefully coming soon. It has a 2.5 Gbps network port and M.2 slot, but the overall bus is still limited to 5 Gbps (3.6 Gbps real-world) because of the Pi's internal PCIe x1 Gen 2 lane.
If you really need the sustained performance, especially if you want to use it for things like transcoding, it's better to get more supported hardware.
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#16PiBox is built by us, KubeSail! We're a YC S19 company that focuses on home-hosting and shipping open-source software to customers. Happy to answer any questions!
I spent a little time testing Kubesail when I was testing the PiBox, and I have to say I really liked it. I typically don't run 'managed' solutions for K8s, but the way everything connected together gave me Rancher Labs vibes, it was simple to use and mostly intuitive.
With a little more polish I could see myself recommending it to more people, especially in tandem with units like the PiBox.
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#17I love everything about this except the included 15W power supply, which seems too low for a CM4, fan, display, two SSDs, and the SATA controller.
The CM4 draws somewhere between 7 and 9 watts under peak load, and each SSD would be around 2W under load. That feels pretty tight already.
I'm sure it would be totally fine at idle and low loads, but I just can't see it being enough juice at full load with two drives, especially if there are other services running on it and the storage is encrypted.
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#18Interesting. Usually my critique for products like this is something along the lines of "great, but how are you going to access your data from the internet?" Typically the answer to that is you need some sort of tunneling service like ngrok to get around port forwarding, CGNAT, firewalls, etc. I maintain a list of solutions here[0]. The problem with most of these services is that they're targeted at developers and aren't something the average user should have to mess with.
In this case, the PiBox is being offered by KubeSail[1], a company which specializes in services like tunneling (they're already on the list mentioned above). It will be very interesting to see if they can bundle it in such a way that people don't have to worry about how the tunneling works. Extra points if they make it easy for users to buy/use their own domains.
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#19it's gonna be amazing when low end a starts packing some real io. some day there'll be more than a lane or two of pcie.
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#20PiBox is built by us, KubeSail! We're a YC S19 company that focuses on home-hosting and shipping open-source software to customers. Happy to answer any questions!
Love the product and hope to see more success in this space.
Will it be easy for users to bring their own domain and/or buy one through you, or will they have to use a domain you control to use KubeSail tunneling?