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

Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 78 posts

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

#61

Post by jmnicolas »

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.

They all run with the official power supply.

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

#62

Post by sgarland »

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 Pi 4 that's been rock stable, running both Hypriot w/ Docker containers, and recently, TalosOS w/ full k8s. Single-node k8s on a Pi is horrendously slow during changes, if you're wondering, but it's fast enough once everything is stable. I have it running JupyterLab right now. Don't really notice a difference in speed once the kernel launches for tinkering-level scripts.

Mine is powered via PoE FWIW.

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

#63

Post by no_time »

Hamuko wrote: post #43
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.

My Synology has been anything but realiable in the past month or so. I've twice had to hard reboot it because it stops working. I think it stops writing all data, which means that even something as simepl as "echo "" > out" will hang forever. Can't even turn it off because DSM stops responding and "sudo reboot" hangs. I have no idea whether it's a disk going bad, the file system going bad or the entire device going b…

Does it hang with ssh timing out? In that case, next time it hangs try opening it up and logging in via the UART interface available on most Synology NASes. Also it may give you extra info if the kernel panicks.

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

#64

Post by abe-101 »

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've been running a pi at home for more than a half a year now. It's running multiple web services, like my personal blog https://habet.dev/blog nextcloud, wireguard, pihole and more.

Lately I started writing blog posts detailing the set up: https://habet.dev/self-hosting-and-securing-web-services-out...

I haven't had any issues with it!

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

#65

Post by Hamuko »

no_time wrote: post #63
Hamuko wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Synology has been anything but realiable in the past month or so. I've twice had to hard reboot it because it stops working. I think it stops writing all data, which means that even something as simepl as "echo "" > out" will hang forever. Can't even turn it off because DSM stops responding and "sudo reboot" hangs. I have no idea whether it's a disk going bad, the file system going bad or the entire device going b…

Does it hang with ssh timing out? In that case, next time it hangs try opening it up and logging in via the UART interface available on most Synology NASes. Also it may give you extra info if the kernel panicks.

No, it's usually just the individual command that hangs. I'm pretty sure I could just ^C end the `echo "" > out` command.

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

#66

Post by t-3 »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #39
t-3 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HD controller? (the main IC in the center of the front-panel board) in my Cloudshell 2 imploded recently, now I am stuck trying to figure out what to do. I really don't want to shell out for a whole new NAS, and the XU4 is still running great after repasting the heatsink... but it randomly loses the drives when there's too much activity (I tried libata.force=1.5G, but no luck).

Likely the USB-Cable from XU4 to HD controller - exchange it. Hardkernel confirmed that their cables were poor quality and resulted in many disconnects. Mine were gone after exchanging cables. I have to say my Odroid only runs once a week - started remotely through IPSEC for offsite backups. So it is not a 24/7 setup.

It's not the cable - the main IC in the board that the drives plug into "imploded" - there are cracks in package and it's sunken in. I was running it for ~4 years essentially 100% uptime, but took it down in early 2019 and didn't get it set back up until now.

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

#67

Post by magicalhippo »

jmnicolas wrote: post #61
zozbot234 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They all run with the official power supply.

Are you using official cables too? Cause all my Pi instabilities have come from power supply issues, and in all cases the problem was actually due to crappy cables.

I bought a cheap USB cable tester[1] from AliExpress and ended up throwing away half my cables.

[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32973869742.html (random store, feel free to find another)

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

#68

Post by magicalhippo »

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

OTOH if you need the GPIO, power consumption or form factor it's hard to beat a Pi. They're not the best on power, but they're better than a NUC.

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

#69

Post by nonbirithm »

I bought a Pi 4 with the intention of using it as a services box for a Synology NAS, but it turns out that hosting a Postgres cluster over the network isn't a good idea.

I've since moved the data onto an SSD directly connected to the Pi and use the NAS purely as a backup mechanism, which I guess was the point of having a NAS to begin with. I get the impression that trying to run things directly on the NAS is cumbersome with Synology's OS.

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

#70

Post by karmicthreat »

yumraj wrote: post #56
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?

It just depends on how much effort you want to put into it. I'm a software engineer, not an IT person. Most of the value I generate is related to writing software. So when we needed a shared NAS for the company I setup a FreeNAS server. Got a used ebay rack server and put it on there. Worked just ok, just had to keep tweaking stuff with it, the UI kind of sucked, used ebay servers are crap hardware and fail, etc.

Got a Synology had it up and running in an hour and I was pretty much done. Every 6 months I take a look at it or add a user if I need to. But it pretty much takes care of itself and I don't worry about it. It emails me every sunday with its status and I call it good. I can keep doing the actual productive parts of my job.

Post reply on HN