Looks great - exactly what I've always wanted to do with a Pi. Won't be buying one however, as the price is frankly outrageous; considering what you can get from a NUC or a Lenovo ThinkCentre, I would want to pay no more than £100 for the novel components, then bring my own CM4 and drives.
PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
31–40 of 130 posts
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#32Interesting. 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 ar…
i have a systemd cron job (timer) that runs miniupnpc every couple minutes to ask the router to set up firewall rules that a box needs. for now i still manually update my home's dns records whenever there's a power outage and therefore new ip address. but i'll be building something dor dynamic dns soon enough. but a couple boxes also ssh into a vps, and forward their own ssh ports to the vps, so i can jump into them…
Damn, that you need to do all of that ... My router (FritzBox) allows selecting a device to forward specific ports from and even supports DynDNS.
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#33Looks great - exactly what I've always wanted to do with a Pi. Won't be buying one however, as the price is frankly outrageous; considering what you can get from a NUC or a Lenovo ThinkCentre, I would want to pay no more than £100 for the novel components, then bring my own CM4 and drives.
If it's not clear on the kickstarter, there is a $100 bundle that only includes the custom components, and lets you bring your own drives and CM4!
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#34Looks great - exactly what I've always wanted to do with a Pi. Won't be buying one however, as the price is frankly outrageous; considering what you can get from a NUC or a Lenovo ThinkCentre, I would want to pay no more than £100 for the novel components, then bring my own CM4 and drives.
If it's not clear on the kickstarter, there is a $100 bundle that only includes the custom components, and lets you bring your own drives and CM4!
That doesn't include the case though, which renders this back to the same state as my current Pi estate, ie "bundle of cables and boards too ugly to want to leave out".
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's not clear on the kickstarter, there is a $100 bundle that only includes the custom components, and lets you bring your own drives and CM4!
That doesn't include the case though, which renders this back to the same state as my current Pi estate, ie "bundle of cables and boards too ugly to want to leave out".
Ah fair enough - we are also releasing our case's 3D files so you can easily print your own. I don't believe it's mentioned anywhere, but we're also planning on selling the cases on their own.
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#36So how is this different to existing cloud solutions like Dropbox, Google Drive or iCloud?
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#37So how is this different to existing cloud solutions like Dropbox, Google Drive or iCloud?
... that you host it?
That's like asking how cooking is different from eating out. You do it yourself, you customize all the things, you're independent, it can be cheaper than managed services if you discount your time or even scale it only a little bit, and many people simply enjoy it.
And if something goes wrong, you know who's at fault, who's on call, and who's gonna fix it :D (I host my own mail server among other thing, and it's mostly unattended but still I felt I should nuance the comment a little bit.)
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#38I recently did something like this myself with an RPi 4 and an external drive over USB to replace Google Photos (with PhotoPrism). For tunneling (and custom domain) I used cloudflared which works surprisingly well: https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared. I wrote about it here: https://domh.dev/blog/replacing-google-photos-with-photopris...
That being said, I love that someone is working on making this stuff easier to do, it was finicky to get it setup myself. I would be backing it if I hadn't just done it already.
I wish Kubesail all the best and I hope they succeed.
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#39I'm looking for something like this, but cheaper and for 3.5" drives. USD$250, plus shipping to Australia puts that just too high for what it offers.
I own Synology NASs, but adding an expander for that is expensive. (AUD$800)
The ODroid-HC4 looks promising, but their 'toaster' case design for it is awful, leaving the drives exposed and unable to put two atop each other.
Ideally what I'd like is:
- 1-2x 3.5" SATA drives
- Gbit NIC
- Enough grunt to run some kind of clustered filesystem (gluster, ceph, whatever)
The idea being that I could start a cluster with say 3x of these devices, and then as my storage needs grow - add more.
They don't need to have stellar IO, but enough to keep up with plex.
Re: PiBox Mini – Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server
#40Interesting. 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 ar…
I've heard good things about tailscale which does something magical I don't quite understand to get around NAT and allow access to your box in a secure way. I know (not so technical) people who have used it successfully.