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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

#181

Post by philjohn »

espadrine wrote: post #178
sandreas wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any (semi-)scientific proof to that (serious question)? I did search a lot to this topic but found nothing...

Here is someone that had significant corruption until they stopped: https://www.xda-developers.com/why-not-to-spin-down-nas-hard... There are many similar articles.

I wonder if they were just hit with the bathtub curve?

Or perhaps the fact that my IronWolf drives are 5400rpm rather than 7200rpm means they're still going strong after 4 years with no issues spinning down after 20 minutes.

Or maybe I'm just insanely lucky? Before I moved to my desktop machine being 100% SSD I used hard drives for close to 30 years and never had a drive go bad. I did tend to use drives for a max of 3-5 years though before upgrading for more space.

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

#182

Post by qwertox »

lmz wrote: post #134
qwertox wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.am…

Note the RAM list linked above doesn't show ECC SODIMM options.

Thank you. I thought I had it selected in the beginning, but no. The list then contains only one entry

https://geizhals.de/?cat=ramddr3&sort=r&xf=1454_49152%7E1590...

Kingston Server Premier SO-DIMM 48GB, DDR5-5600, CL46-45-45, ECC KSM56T46BD8KM-48HM for 250€

Which then means 500€ for the 96GB

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

#183

Post by Dr4kn »

1over137 wrote: post #129
markhahn wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

such power claims are problematic - you're not letting the HDs spin down, for instance, and not crediting the fact that an SSD may easily dissipate more power than an HD under load. (in this thread, the host and network are slow, so it's not relevant that SSDs are far faster when active.)

Letting hdds spin down is generally not advisable in a NAS, unless you access it really rarely perhaps.

Spin down isn't as problematic today. It really depends on your setup and usage.

If the stuff you access often can be cashed to SSDs you rarely access it. Depending on your file system and operating system only drives that are in use can be spun up. If you have multiple drive arrays with media some of it won't be accessed as often.

In an enterprise setting it generally doesn't make sense. For a home environment disks you generally don't access the data that often. Automatic downloads and seeding change that.

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

#184

Post by [deleted] »

philjohn wrote: post #181
espadrine wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is someone that had significant corruption until they stopped: https://www.xda-developers.com/why-not-to-spin-down-nas-hard... There are many similar articles.

I wonder if they were just hit with the bathtub curve? Or perhaps the fact that my IronWolf drives are 5400rpm rather than 7200rpm means they're still going strong after 4 years with no issues spinning down after 20 minutes. Or maybe I'm just insanely lucky? Before I moved to my desktop machine being 100% SSD I used hard drives for close to 30 years and never had a drive go bad. I did tend to use drives for a max of…

[deleted]

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

#185

Post by dwedge »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #177
timc3 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would run 2 or more parity disks always. I have had disks fail and rebuilding with only one parity drive is scary (have seen rebuilds go bad because a second drive failed whilst rebuilding). But agree about backups.

Were those arrays doing regular scrubs, so that they experience rebuild-equivalent load every month or two and it's not a sudden shock to them? If your odds of disk failure in a rebuild are "only" 10x normal failure rate, and it takes a week, 5 disks will all survive that week 98% of the time. That's plenty for a NAS.

If the drives are the same age and large parts of the drive haven't been read from for a long time until the rebuild you might find it already failed. Anecdotally around 12 years ago the chances of a second disk failing during a raid 5 rebuild (in our setup) was probably more like 10-20%

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

#186

Post by Takennickname »

brookst wrote: post #19
Takennickname wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have the pro. I'm not sure if the Max will do passthrough but a quick google seems to indicate that it won't. (There's a discussion on the proxmox forum)

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

#187

Post by Dylan16807 »

dwedge wrote: post #185
Dylan16807 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were those arrays doing regular scrubs, so that they experience rebuild-equivalent load every month or two and it's not a sudden shock to them? If your odds of disk failure in a rebuild are "only" 10x normal failure rate, and it takes a week, 5 disks will all survive that week 98% of the time. That's plenty for a NAS.

If the drives are the same age and large parts of the drive haven't been read from for a long time until the rebuild you might find it already failed. Anecdotally around 12 years ago the chances of a second disk failing during a raid 5 rebuild (in our setup) was probably more like 10-20%

> and large parts of the drive haven't been read from for a long time

Hence the first sentence of my three sentence post.

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

#189

Post by ilkhan4 »

samhclark wrote: post #61
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 think you're right generally, but I wanna call out the ODROID H4 models as an exception to a lot of what you said. They are mostly upgradable (SODIMM RAM, SATA ports, M.2 2280 slots), and it does support in-band ECC which kinda checks the ECC box. They've got a Mini-ITX adapter for $15 so it can fit into existing cases too. No IPMI and not very many NVME slots. So I think you're right that a good mATX board could b…

You can get a 1 -> 4 M.2 adapter for these as well which would give each one a 1x PCIe lane (same as all these other boards). If you still want spinning rust, these also have built-in power for those and SATA ports so you only need a 12-19v power supply. No idea why these aren't more popular as a basis for a NAS.

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

#190

Post by tlamponi »

transpute wrote: post #12

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 othe…

With some currently still a bit of hands-on approach you can set up measured boot that can measure everything from the BIOS (settings) through the kernel, the initrd, and also kernel command line parameters.

I currently do not have time for a clear how to, but some relevant references would be:

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

https://www.krose.org/~krose/measured_boot

Integrating this better into Proxmox projects is definitively something I'd like to see sooner or later.

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