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Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee Carrier Board

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Re: Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee Carrier Board

#21

Post by whalesalad »

znpy wrote: post #7

I wouldnt trust my data with this kind of devices. There's nothing wrong per se, but I have my doubts about how easy you can find replacement parts if something breaks in, say, a year or two. If you really depend on your data and want it to be safe, i'd recommend spending the extra money and either getting a proper nas (synology/qnap) or go the proper diy way (aka an x86 box and truenas/unraid). you really don't want…

If you aren’t using hardware raid or another disk management tool that locks you in to one manufacturer or worse one unique controller - you should be able to take your disks to any other machine and rebuild your array.

At least, that’s how you should be constructing a home NAS if that’s what you’re doing.

The same situation can arise with a popular/managed solution like qnap/syno.

I have a DS918 and really love it (it’s one of those set it and forget it machines) but I don’t totally know how it works. It’s Linux of course, but it’s sorta a black box.

So I think there is a lot to be said for DIY as long as you are aware of the drawbacks and engineer around them accordingly.

Re: Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee Carrier Board

#22

Post by dsr_ »

IgorPartola wrote: post #15
dsr_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a household backup device, rather than a NAS, this is actually pretty good. Use mdadm RAID-10 across four spinning disks, or RAID-1 across a pair and have two slots free. If the board fails, you can plug them into any other Linux box with SATA ports available. Most people have no better than 1Gb/s ethernet available in their house anyway. One expects a backup or restore to take a while, but also not to be interact…

ECC and zfs/btrfs I think are a must for any data you care about. RAID 1 isn’t going to save you when you can’t tell which copy of the given block is the corrupted one.

It completely depends on what your specific circumstances are, and something is always better than nothing.

(Also, you aren't getting ECC RAM at this price point, no matter what.)

What's a good use case for this? A house with a few laptops, a desktop and one server. Everything uses the server as their datastore. The server runs ZFS, but even ZFS can run out of luck, so you send over a snapshot to the backup device every day or three. It's insurance.

Re: Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee Carrier Board

#23

Post by magicalhippo »

fogihujy wrote: post #13
magicalhippo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just use USB3 - SATA connectors...

Yeah, USB drives with their own power supplies work very well with the Pi, but I can imagine high workloads could quickly run into problems and/or bottlenecks.

True, though that bottleneck would mostly be with the Pi itself. After all it only has GbE built-in, a single HD will easily saturate that for sequential loads or all loads for a SSD.

I have 8 disks hooked up to a Pi4 through USB3-SATA[1] with external 12V, works quite well in terms of reliability (had to turn on quirks mode[2] though). As I mentioned the main limitation is the single 1GbE interface, but this is just for archive data so.

[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000001204302.html

[2]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=245931

Re: Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee Carrier Board

#24

Post by Nursie »

That looks a lot like the mainboard from the Western Digital Sharespace I had about 10 years ago.

I was recently wanting a NAS again, but came to the conclusion that the best bang for your buck was just grabbing a cheap mini-ITX board and processor as the price of dedicated NAS boxes was not much different and was far less flexible. Then you would have full-fat sata, even m2 for a boot drive, whatever RAM you wanted etc.

I know it's not a very exciting solution...

Re: Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee Carrier Board

#25

Post by m3at »

znpy wrote: post #7

I wouldnt trust my data with this kind of devices. There's nothing wrong per se, but I have my doubts about how easy you can find replacement parts if something breaks in, say, a year or two. If you really depend on your data and want it to be safe, i'd recommend spending the extra money and either getting a proper nas (synology/qnap) or go the proper diy way (aka an x86 box and truenas/unraid). you really don't want…

For the DIY way, I recommend the Helios64 if you're looking for an ARM SBC with a complete NAS package: https://kobol.io/

Re: Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee Carrier Board

#26

Post by vladvasiliu »

88 wrote: post #20
smarx007 wrote: post #17

Nothing against cool RPi projects but be aware that a motherboard with a NAS-grade Celeron, like ASRock J4105M, sells for $85 or so (but needs RAM, $20 for 4GB roughly). At $105, this leaves this carrier board around $35 of budget if you can get RPi CM4 4GB for $70. Plus all the doubts about reliability mentioned above.

Presumably that board will need a separate PSU, RAM, storage for a boot drive, etc? Also it only has two SATA ports so would need a PCIe expansion card to match the four ports offered by the Pi board? I suspect the Pi is also significantly more power efficient?

There are similar motherboards with 4 SATA ports. I have an older Gigabyte GA-J3455N-D3H with 4 SATA ports and two gigabit network controllers that cost in the same ballpark as GP's model.

RAM is accounted for in GP's description.

Regarding the boot drive, you can either boot from the data disks (say via a common ZFS pool or a common raid + lvm) or if you're happy with a SD card for the PI, I suppose a small USB drive would do the trick.

Regarding the PSU, but you'd need a beefy adapter anyway for running 4 drives, which isn't cheap, and there are cheap pico-atx PSUs available. I bought a compact case + PSU for my board for 50 euros around two years ago [1] that's still going strong (although I'm only running a single SSD in it), so the PSU alone should be less than that.

There's of course the power efficiency question and I presume this setup would be somewhat more power hungry than an RPI. The Intel specs for the J3455 give it at 10W TDP. I have no idea how much RAM consumes, but it's likely a few more watts.

[0] https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-J3455N-D3H-rev-10#ov

[1] https://www.inter-tech.de/en/products/case/mini-itx-nuc/itx-...

Re: Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee Carrier Board

#27

Post by fogihujy »

magicalhippo wrote: post #23
fogihujy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, USB drives with their own power supplies work very well with the Pi, but I can imagine high workloads could quickly run into problems and/or bottlenecks.

True, though that bottleneck would mostly be with the Pi itself. After all it only has GbE built-in, a single HD will easily saturate that for sequential loads or all loads for a SSD. I have 8 disks hooked up to a Pi4 through USB3-SATA[1] with external 12V, works quite well in terms of reliability (had to turn on quirks mode[2] though). As I mentioned the main limitation is the single 1GbE interface, but this is just…

Yep, I've also noticed some unreliability when doing things like adding a mirror drive; at some point the USB controller just seems to fall off the horse and everything crashes.

My setup mainly streams video/music over wifi and it's rock solid at lower speeds. I wouldn't rely on it for any heavy duty storage needs though.

Re: Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee Carrier Board

#28

Post by cure »

Damogran6 wrote: post #10

A quick google shows eMMC flash memory for the compute module...do you need to mindfully control writing to flash to keep something like this from nuking the boot device? Could be my choice of storage (whatever $4 buys at Microcenter) but the failure mode on my RPi weather station was SD card death. I'd hate to rely on that for a NAS.

You can also boot the pi 4 via kind-of-special-sauce PXE. I wish they had just adopted standard PXE (why do we need a magic string? What the hell is going on with the three spaces in that magic string... Why can't we use the standard PXE way to specify the file to load?), but it's better than nothing. See https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

[edit: fixed spelling]

Re: Build a Raspberry Pi CM4 4-Bay NAS with Wiretrustee Carrier Board

#30

Post by znpy »

dsr_ wrote: post #12
znpy wrote: post #7

I wouldnt trust my data with this kind of devices. There's nothing wrong per se, but I have my doubts about how easy you can find replacement parts if something breaks in, say, a year or two. If you really depend on your data and want it to be safe, i'd recommend spending the extra money and either getting a proper nas (synology/qnap) or go the proper diy way (aka an x86 box and truenas/unraid). you really don't want…

As a household backup device, rather than a NAS, this is actually pretty good. Use mdadm RAID-10 across four spinning disks, or RAID-1 across a pair and have two slots free. If the board fails, you can plug them into any other Linux box with SATA ports available. Most people have no better than 1Gb/s ethernet available in their house anyway. One expects a backup or restore to take a while, but also not to be interact…

> Most people have no better than 1Gb/s ethernet available in their house anyway

This is partially true. Most people have no better than 1Gb/sec per single computer. That means that a single pc using the full 1Gb/sec would saturate the nas network I/O and degrade performances for all other clients.

Which may or may not be okay... You just know to be aware of that.

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