Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by Nursie » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 12:49 AM UTC

sorenjan wrote: post #87

Is it possible (and easy) to make a NAS with harddrives for storage and an SSD for cache? I don't have any data that I use daily or even weekly, so I don't want the drives spinning needlessly 24/7, and I think an SSD cache would stop having to spin them up most of the time. For instance, most reads from a media NAS will probably be biased towards both newly written files, and sequentially (next episode). This is a us…

I used to run a zfs setup with an ssd for L2ARC and SLOG.

Can’t tell you how it worked out performance-wise, because I didn’t really benchmark it. But it was easy enough to set up.

These days I just use SATA SSDs for the whole array.

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

#142

Post by windowsrookie » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 12:53 AM UTC

monster_truck wrote: post #105

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 ty…

The Mac Studio is pretty close + silent and power efficient. But it's isn't cheap like an N100 PC.

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

#143

Post by ezschemi » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 12:55 AM UTC

I was about to order that GMKtek G9 and then saw Jeff's video about it on the same day. All those issues, even with the later fixes he showed, are a big no-no for me. Instead, I went with a Odroid H4-Ultra with an Intel N305, 48GB Crucial DDR5 and 4x4TB Samsung 990 Evo SSDs (low-power usage) + a 2TB SATA SSD to boot from. Yes, the SSDs are way overkill and pretty expensive at $239 per Samsung 990 Evo (got them with a deal at Amazon). It's running TrueNAS. I am somewhat space-limited with this system, didn't want spinning disks (as the whole house slightly shakes when pickup or trash trucks pass by), wanted a fun project and I also wanted to go as small as possible.

No issues so far. The system is completely stable. Though, I did add a separate fan at the bottom of the Odroid case to help cool the NVMe SSDs. Even with the single lane of PCIe, the 2.5gbit/s networking gets maxed out. Maybe I could try bonding the 2 networking ports but I don't have any client devices that could use it.

I had an eye on the Beelink ME Mini too, but I don't think the NVMe disks are sufficiently cooled under load, especially on the outer side of the disks.

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

#144

Post by getcrunk » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:04 AM UTC

Whenever these things come up I have to point out the most of these manufactures don’t do bios updates. Since spectre/meltdown we see cpu and bios vulnerabilities every few months-yearly.

I know u can patch microcode at runtime/boot but I don’t think that covers all vulnerabilities

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

#145

Post by windowsrookie » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:05 AM UTC

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…

You can order the Mac mini with 10gbps networking and it has 3 thunderbolt 4 ports if you need more. Plus it has an internal power supply making it smaller than most of these mini PCs.

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

#146

Post by ksec » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:15 AM UTC

Something that Apple should have done with TimeCapsule iOS but they were too focused on service revenue.

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

#147

Post by waterhouse » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:17 AM UTC

> Testing it out with my disk benchmarking script, I got up to 3 GB/sec in sequential reads.

To be sure... is the data compressible, or repeated? I have encountered an SSD that silently performed compression on the data I wrote to it (verified by counting its stats on blocks written). I don't know if there are SSDs that silently deduplicate the data.

(An obvious solution is to copy data from /dev/urandom. But beware of the CPU cost of /dev/urandom; on a recent machine, it takes 3 seconds to read 1GB from /dev/urandom, so that would be the bottleneck in a write test. But at least for a read test, it doesn't matter how long the data took to write.)

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

#148

Post by transpute » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:25 AM UTC

getcrunk wrote: post #144

Whenever these things come up I have to point out the most of these manufactures don’t do bios updates. Since spectre/meltdown we see cpu and bios vulnerabilities every few months-yearly. I know u can patch microcode at runtime/boot but I don’t think that covers all vulnerabilities

Hence the need for coreboot support.

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

#149

Post by geerlingguy » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 2:06 AM UTC

windowsrookie wrote: post #145

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…

You can order the Mac mini with 10gbps networking and it has 3 thunderbolt 4 ports if you need more. Plus it has an internal power supply making it smaller than most of these mini PCs.

That's what I'm running as my main desktop at home, and I have an external 2TB TB5 SSD, which gives me 3 GB/sec.

If I could get the same unit for like $299 I'd run it like that for my NAS too, as long as I could run a full backup to another device (and a 3rd on the cloud with Glacier of course).

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

#150

Post by throw0101d » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 2:18 AM UTC

ndiddy wrote: post #109

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 $50…

> […] mechanical hard drives are still way more cost effective for storing lots of data than NVMe.

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