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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

#101

Post by cyanydeez »

sandreas wrote: post #49

While it may be tempting to go "mini" and NVMe, for a normal use case I think this is hardly cost effective. You give up so much by using an all in mini device... No Upgrades, no ECC, harder cooling, less I/O. I have had a Proxmox Server with a used Fujitsu D3417 and 64gb ecc for roughly 5 years now, paid 350 bucks for the whole thing and upgraded the storage once from 1tb to 2tb. It draws 12-14W in normal day use an…

I've had a synology since 2015. Why, besides the drives themselves, would most home labs need to upgrade?

I don't really understand the general public, or even most usages, requiring upgrade paths beyond get a new device.

By the time the need to upgrade comes, the tech stack is likely faster and you're basically just talking about gutting the PC and doing everything over again, except maybe power supply.

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

#102

Post by layer8 »

bhouston wrote: post #73

I am currently running a 8 4TB NVMe NAS via OpenZFS on TrueNAS Linux. It is good but my box is quite large. I made this via a standard AMD motherboard with both built-in NVMe slots as well as a bunch of expansion PCEi cards. It is very fast. I was thinking of replacing it with a Asustor FLASHSTOR 12, much more compact form factor and it fits up to 12 NVMes. I will miss TrueNAS though, but it would be so much smaller.

You can install TrueNAS on it: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/how-i-installed-truen...

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

#103

Post by sandreas »

cyanydeez wrote: post #101
sandreas wrote: post #49

While it may be tempting to go "mini" and NVMe, for a normal use case I think this is hardly cost effective. You give up so much by using an all in mini device... No Upgrades, no ECC, harder cooling, less I/O. I have had a Proxmox Server with a used Fujitsu D3417 and 64gb ecc for roughly 5 years now, paid 350 bucks for the whole thing and upgraded the storage once from 1tb to 2tb. It draws 12-14W in normal day use an…

I've had a synology since 2015. Why, besides the drives themselves, would most home labs need to upgrade? I don't really understand the general public, or even most usages, requiring upgrade paths beyond get a new device. By the time the need to upgrade comes, the tech stack is likely faster and you're basically just talking about gutting the PC and doing everything over again, except maybe power supply.

Understandable... Well, the bottleneck for a Proxmox Server often is RAM - sometimes CPU cores (to share between VMs). This might not be the case for a NAS-only device.

Another upgrade path is to keep the case, fans, cooling solution and only switch Mainboard, CPU and RAM.

I'm also not a huge fan of non x64 devices, because they still often require jumping through some hoops regarding boot order, external device boot or power loss struggle.

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

#104

Post by al_borland »

leptons wrote: post #77
al_borland wrote: post #24

I’ve been thinking about moving from SSDs for my NAS to solid state. The drive are so loud, all the time, it’s very annoying. My first experience with these cheap mini PCs was with a Beelink and it was very positive and makes me question the longevity of the hardware. For a NAS, that’s important to me.

> moving from SSDs for my NAS to solid state. SSD = Solid State Drive So you're moving from solid state to solid state?

That should have been HDD. Typo. Seems too late to edit.

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

#105

Post by monster_truck »

These are cute, I'd really like to see the "serious" version.

Something like a Ryzen 7745, 128gb ecc ddr5-5200, no less than two 10gbe ports (though unrealistic given the size, if they were sfp+ that'd be incredible), drives split across two different nvme raid controllers. I don't care how expensive or loud it is or how much power it uses, I just want a coffee-cup sized cube that can handle the kind of shit you'd typically bring a rack along for. It's 2025.

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

#106

Post by ac29 »

archagon wrote: post #69

These look compelling, but unfortunately, we know that SSDs are not nearly as reliable as spinning rust hard drives when it comes to data retention: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered... (I assume M.2 cards are the same, but have not confirmed.) If this isn’t running 24/7, I’m not sure I would trust it with my most precious data. Also, these things are just begging for a 10Gbps Ethernet port…

Your link is talking about leaving drives unpowered for years. That would be a very odd use of a NAS.

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

#107

Post by archagon »

ac29 wrote: post #106
archagon wrote: post #69

These look compelling, but unfortunately, we know that SSDs are not nearly as reliable as spinning rust hard drives when it comes to data retention: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered... (I assume M.2 cards are the same, but have not confirmed.) If this isn’t running 24/7, I’m not sure I would trust it with my most precious data. Also, these things are just begging for a 10Gbps Ethernet port…

Your link is talking about leaving drives unpowered for years. That would be a very odd use of a NAS.

True, but it's still concerning. For example, I have a NAS with some long-term archives that I power on maybe once a month. Am I going to see SSD data loss from a usage pattern like that?

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

#108

Post by 9x39 »

gorkish wrote: post #90

NVMe NAS is completely and totally pointless with such crap connectivity. What in the WORLD is preventing these systems from getting at least 10gbps interfaces? I have been waiting for years and years and years and years and the only thing on the market for small systems with good networking is weird stuff that you have to email Qotom to order direct from China and _ONE_ system from Minisforum. I'm beginning to think…

>What in the WORLD is preventing these systems from getting at least 10gbps interfaces?

Price and price. Like another commenter said, there is at least one 10Gbe mini NAS out there, but it's several times more expensive.

What's the use case for the 10GbE? Is ~200MB/sec not enough?

I think the segment for these units is low price, small size, shared connectivity. The kind of thing you tuck away in your house invisibly and silently, or throw in a bag to travel with if you have a few laptops that need shared storage. People with high performance needs probably already have fast nvme local storage is probably the thinking.

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

#109

Post by ndiddy »

sandreas wrote: post #49

While it may be tempting to go "mini" and NVMe, for a normal use case I think this is hardly cost effective. You give up so much by using an all in mini device... No Upgrades, no ECC, harder cooling, less I/O. I have had a Proxmox Server with a used Fujitsu D3417 and 64gb ecc for roughly 5 years now, paid 350 bucks for the whole thing and upgraded the storage once from 1tb to 2tb. It draws 12-14W in normal day use an…

Another thing is that unless you have a very specific need for SSDs (such as heavily random access focused workloads, very tight space constraints, or working in a bumpy environment), mechanical hard drives are still way more cost effective for storing lots of data than NVMe. You can get a manufacturer refurbished 12TB hard drive with a multi-year warranty for ~$120, while even an 8TB NVMe drive goes for at least $500. Of course for general-purpose internal drives, NVMe is a far better experience than a mechanical HDD, but my NAS with 6 hard drives in RAIDz2 still gets bottlenecked by my 2.5GBit LAN, not the speeds of the drives.

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

cyanydeez wrote: post #101
sandreas wrote: post #49

While it may be tempting to go "mini" and NVMe, for a normal use case I think this is hardly cost effective. You give up so much by using an all in mini device... No Upgrades, no ECC, harder cooling, less I/O. I have had a Proxmox Server with a used Fujitsu D3417 and 64gb ecc for roughly 5 years now, paid 350 bucks for the whole thing and upgraded the storage once from 1tb to 2tb. It draws 12-14W in normal day use an…

I've had a synology since 2015. Why, besides the drives themselves, would most home labs need to upgrade? I don't really understand the general public, or even most usages, requiring upgrade paths beyond get a new device. By the time the need to upgrade comes, the tech stack is likely faster and you're basically just talking about gutting the PC and doing everything over again, except maybe power supply.

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