Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS • Hacker News Board

Re: Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS

#51

Post by johngalt » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 6:59 PM UTC

kencausey wrote: post #5

timbit42 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about Synology only allowing their rebranded Toshiba drives to work in their NAS? That's a deal breaker for me. EDIT: Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596179

Where did you get that idea? Below are links to Synology acknowledged compatible drives with multiple brands and even that doesn't imply that only these will work: https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=produ... https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=produ...

That's a Synology released four years ago. Contrast with a model released in February this year. Not a single drive non-Synology drive on the HCL larger than 4TB:

https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=produ...

It's not a hard requirement to use Synology drives, but on the newer/higher-end models the options to not use Synology drives are very limited. For example the FS2500 only has four models of SSD on the HCL and two are Synology.

IMHO, the price premium for the Synology branded drives is reasonable. Pay for the validated drives. Maintaining a broad HCL is no small task.

https://blog.synology.com/in-pursuit-of-reliability-hat5300-...

Re: Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS

#52

Post by FpUser » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

rcpt wrote: post #45

FpUser wrote: post #33

Pi 4 is unobtanium now. One of my projects is screwed at the moment because of that

What do you need the pi for? The size? Intel NUC is substantially more powerful and after power bank, SD, case etc you end up paying about the same

I am well aware about NUCs. I do not really want to talk here why I need Pi in particular. I am however amazed at how easily people here make whole bunch of assumptions that have nothing to do with the actual case.

Re: Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS

#53

Post by jmnicolas » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 7:12 PM UTC

Frankly I'm fed up with pi's: they're not reliable at all for 24/7 uses cases.

I have a PI 3 at work that needs frequent hard reboots because it fails to read the USB peripheral it's connected to.

I also have half dozen PI 4 connected to big screens, that randomly fail to show anything (black screen). They need several hard reboot to get back to work.

My boss wasn't convinced that it was the pis fault. To prove it, I just connected an old PC tower on one of the screen: this setup never caused any problem in months.

Re: Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS

#54

Post by Hamuko » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

jmnicolas wrote: post #53

Frankly I'm fed up with pi's: they're not reliable at all for 24/7 uses cases. I have a PI 3 at work that needs frequent hard reboots because it fails to read the USB peripheral it's connected to. I also have half dozen PI 4 connected to big screens, that randomly fail to show anything (black screen). They need several hard reboot to get back to work. My boss wasn't convinced that it was the pis fault. To prove it, I…

I have a Raspberry Pi running Wireguard that's pretty reliable - but it's really just running Wireguard.

Re: Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS

#55

Post by zozbot234 » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

jmnicolas wrote: post #53

Frankly I'm fed up with pi's: they're not reliable at all for 24/7 uses cases. I have a PI 3 at work that needs frequent hard reboots because it fails to read the USB peripheral it's connected to. I also have half dozen PI 4 connected to big screens, that randomly fail to show anything (black screen). They need several hard reboot to get back to work. My boss wasn't convinced that it was the pis fault. To prove it, I…

You're probably using an unreliable power supply. Use something official, and put any USB peripherals on a separately powered hub.

Re: Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS

#56

Post by yumraj » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 7:42 PM UTC

karmicthreat wrote: post #23

I bought a Synology not for the hardware, but the software. I went down the FreeNAS/TrueNAS rabbithole before. But it's a pain and the Synology software lets me get things setup easier.

I was thinking of going the other way, from synology to TrueNas Scale since is Linux based.

Are you suggesting that that’s a fool’s errand and I shouldn’t do that?

Re: Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS

#57

Post by riedel » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #55

jmnicolas wrote: post #53

Frankly I'm fed up with pi's: they're not reliable at all for 24/7 uses cases. I have a PI 3 at work that needs frequent hard reboots because it fails to read the USB peripheral it's connected to. I also have half dozen PI 4 connected to big screens, that randomly fail to show anything (black screen). They need several hard reboot to get back to work. My boss wasn't convinced that it was the pis fault. To prove it, I…

You're probably using an unreliable power supply. Use something official, and put any USB peripherals on a separately powered hub.

Interesting to see that the raspi foundation is in the business of PSU certification. It kind of weirdly feels like the next gen Apple...

Re: Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS

#58

Post by hackshack » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

mikece wrote: post #2

After watching Geerling's video on YouTube about building an ARM NAS I almost went that direction -- but opted for a Synology DS918+ instead because my need for a NAS is not just experimental but something that needs to work reliably.

I agonized about this for years. I wanted a proper server, not something embedded or a Pi with a rat's nest of cables, that would still fit in a credenza in the living room.

Ended up getting an HP MicroServer Gen8 and absolutely love it. Same cube design as the DS918+, but with proper iLO (remote media, etc.), lots of boot options, and very stoutly built. It feels like a real HP DL300-series server (the Gen9 does not IMHO). I bought it as it was being discontinued.

It's running VMware ESXi with FreeNAS on top of that, with an LSI SAS card connected to the drive bays, then hardware-pass-through'ed to the FreeNAS VM. I've got the home's DNS server, Pi-hole, Unifi controller, test VMs, etc. happily virtualized alongside FreeNAS. 16GB RAM total, with 8GB dedicated to FreeNAS. Boot is off a microSD card (on the motherboard, naturally) and VM datastore is on an SSD connected where the optical drive would go.

I know I'm violating several recommendations here (low RAM, virtualized FreeNAS, SAS card passed through, etc. etc.) but it does indeed work, very well in fact. 2+ years of serving the home. With the Gen8, HP built almost the perfect home server for tech-oriented types... pity they cost-reduced its successor.

Re: Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS

#59

Post by orev » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

lunfard000 wrote: post #4

Raspberry is not really cheap anymore. The start package (rp4 4gb + charger + sd + ethernet/hdmi cables) is 100 euros in my country. Meanwhile you can get a GK3V mini pc on Aliexpress with a j4125, 8gb LPDDR4 and 256GB SSD for 180 euros, which probably has 3x-4x the performance of the pi.

I’ve found this to be the case for most of the time Raspberry Pis have been around. The cost proposition has always relied on using other components people have “lying around”, like the power adapter, SD card, etc. However as the power quality requirements have gone up for each Pi release, old AC adapters can’t be used anymore, SD cards need to be better quality to handle the writes, and you want a case for it, etc. From my perspective you’ve always been looking at close to $100 to get everything you need for it to be useful.

Re: Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS

#60

Post by KronisLV » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 7:53 PM UTC

You know, i think that ARM is really good for personal computing!

However, right now i'm planning on adding more HDDs to my current homelab, which is made of low power last gen x86 hardware, but even so just 2 boxes with 200 GEs inside currently pull around 100W in total from the wall (PSUs are probably not awfully efficient either, to be honest).

That said, having PCI lanes does keep me hopeful - while i have 4 SATA ports on the mobo, expansion cards could bring that number up pretty nicely. I reckon that i could have about 8 HDDs in each box on consumer hardware with few to no issues, while also using them as servers with ~32 GB of RAM for my container clusters.

If i had to start over, would i go for a Raspberry Pi or an equivalent cluster, or maybe a dedicated NAS? Maybe, as long as ARM software isn't too hard to come across, and the limited RAM or other expandability doesn't become too much of a problem.