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Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#11

Post by Takennickname »

brookst wrote: post #5
koeng wrote: post #2

Are there any mini NAS with ECC ram nowadays? I recall that being my personal limiting factor

The Aoostar WTR max is pretty beefy, supports 5 nvme and 6 hard drives, and up to 128GB of ECC ram. But it’s $700 bare bones, much more than these devices in the article.

Aoostar WTR series is one change away from being the PERFECT home server/nas. Passing the storage controller IOMMU to a VM is finicky at best. Still better than the vast majority of devices that don't allow it at all. But if they do that, I'm in homelab heaven. Unfortunately, the current iteration cannot due to a hardware limitation in the AMD chipset they're using.

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#12

Post by transpute »

Intel N150 is the first consumer Atom [1] CPU (in 15 years!) to include TXT/DRTM for measured system launch with owner-managed keys. At every system boot, this can confirm that immutable components (anything from BIOS+config to the kernel to immutable partitions) have the expected binary hash/tree.

TXT/DRTM can enable AEM (Anti Evil Maid) with Qubes, SystemGuard with Windows IoT and hopefully future support from other operating systems. It would be a valuable feature addition to Proxmox, FreeNAS and OPNsense.

Some (many?) N150 devices from Topton (China) ship without Bootguard fused, which _may_ enable coreboot to be ported to those platforms. Hopefully ODROID (Korea) will ship N150 devices. Then we could have fanless N150 devices with coreboot and DRTM for less-insecure [2] routers and storage.

[1] Gracemont (E-core): https://chipsandcheese.com/p/gracemont-revenge-of-the-atom-c... | https://youtu.be/agUwkj1qTCs (Intel Austin architect, 2021)

[2] "Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion", 400 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726#44427986

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#13

Post by qwertox »

koeng wrote: post #2

Are there any mini NAS with ECC ram nowadays? I recall that being my personal limiting factor

Minisforum N5 Pro Nas has up to 96 GB of ECC RAM

https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro

https://store.minisforum.com/en-de/products/minisforum-n5-n5...

    no RAM 1.399€
  16GB RAM 1.459€
  48GB RAM 1.749€
  96GB RAM 2.119€
96GB DDR5 SO-DIMM costs around 200€ to 280€ in Germany.

https://geizhals.de/?cat=ramddr3&xf=15903_DDR5~15903_SO-DIMM...

I wonder if that 128GB kit would work, as the CPU supports up to 256GB

https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen-pro/...

I can't force the page to show USD prices.

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#14

Post by bee_rider »

Should a mini-NAS be considered a new type of thing with a new design goal? He seems to be describing about a desktop worth of storage (6TB), but always available on the network and less power consuming than a desktop.

This seems useful. But it seems quite different from his previous (80TB) NAS.

What is the idle power draw of an SSD anyway? I guess they usually have a volatile ram cache of some sort built in (is that right?) so it must not be zero…

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#15

Post by MarkSweep »

amluto wrote: post #4
koeng wrote: post #2

Are there any mini NAS with ECC ram nowadays? I recall that being my personal limiting factor

Yes, but not particularly cheap: https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=89

Asustor has some cheaper options that support ECC. Though not as cheap as those in the OP article.

FLASHSTOR 6 Gen2 (FS6806X) $1000 - https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=90

LOCKERSTOR 4 Gen3 (AS6804T) $1300 - https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=86

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#16

Post by dwood_dev »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #10

Would be nice to see what those little N100 / N150 (or big brother N305 / N350) can do with all that NVMe. Raw throughput is pretty whatever but hypothetically if the CPU isn't too gating, there's some interesting IOps potential. Really hoping we see 25/40GbaseT start to show up, so the lower market segments like this can do 10Gbit. Hopefully we see some embedded Ryzens (or other more PCIe willing contendors) in this…

The problem quickly becomes PCIe lanes. The N100/150/305 only have 9 PCIe 3.0 lanes. 5Gbe is fine, but to go to 10Gbe you need x2.

Until there is something in this class with PCIe 4.0, I think we're close to maxing out the IO of these devices.

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#18

Post by geerlingguy »

amelius wrote: post #17

What types of distributed/network filesystem are people running nowadays on Linux?

Ceph or MooseFS are the two that I've seen most popular. All networked FS have drawbacks, I used to run a lot of Gluster, and it certainly added a few grey hairs.

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#19

Post by brookst »

Takennickname wrote: post #11
brookst wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Aoostar WTR max is pretty beefy, supports 5 nvme and 6 hard drives, and up to 128GB of ECC ram. But it’s $700 bare bones, much more than these devices in the article.

Aoostar WTR series is one change away from being the PERFECT home server/nas. Passing the storage controller IOMMU to a VM is finicky at best. Still better than the vast majority of devices that don't allow it at all. But if they do that, I'm in homelab heaven. Unfortunately, the current iteration cannot due to a hardware limitation in the AMD chipset they're using.

Good info! Is it the same limitation on WTR pro and max? The max is an 8845hsv versus the 5825u in the pro.

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#20

Post by geerlingguy »

dwood_dev wrote: post #16
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #10

Would be nice to see what those little N100 / N150 (or big brother N305 / N350) can do with all that NVMe. Raw throughput is pretty whatever but hypothetically if the CPU isn't too gating, there's some interesting IOps potential. Really hoping we see 25/40GbaseT start to show up, so the lower market segments like this can do 10Gbit. Hopefully we see some embedded Ryzens (or other more PCIe willing contendors) in this…

The problem quickly becomes PCIe lanes. The N100/150/305 only have 9 PCIe 3.0 lanes. 5Gbe is fine, but to go to 10Gbe you need x2. Until there is something in this class with PCIe 4.0, I think we're close to maxing out the IO of these devices.

Not only the lanes, but putting through more than 6 Gbps of IO on multiple PCIe devices on the N150 bogs things down. It's only a little faster than something like a Raspberry Pi, there are a lot of little IO bottlenecks (for high speed, that is, it's great for 2.5 Gbps) if you do anything that hits CPU.
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