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

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

#201

Post by kllrnohj » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 3:58 PM 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…

It depends on what you consider "lots" of data. For >20tb yes absolutely obviously by a landslide. But if you just want self-hosted Google Drive or Dropbox you're in the 1-4TB range where mechanical drives are a very bad value as they have a pretty significant price floor. WD Blue 1tb hdd is $40 while WD Blue 1tb nvme is $60. The HDD still has a strict price advantage, but the nvme drive uses way less power, is more reliable, doesn't have spinup time (consumer usage is very infrequently accessed, keeping the mechanical drives spinning continuously gets into that awkward zone of worthwhile)

And these prices are getting low enough, especially with this NUC-based solutions, to actually be price competitive with the low tiers of drive & dropbox while also being something you actually own and control. Dropbox still charges $120/yr for the entry level plan of just 2TB after all. 3x WD Blue NVMEs + an N150 and you're at break-even in 3 years or less

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

#202

Post by sandreas » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:00 PM UTC

sixothree wrote: post #197

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.)

I've put all of my surveillance cameras on one volume in _hopes_ that I can let my other volumes spin down. But nope. They spend the vast majority of their day spinning.

Did you consider ZFS with L2ARC? The extra caching device might make this possible...

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

#203

Post by chaz6 » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:44 PM UTC

miladyincontrol wrote: post #50

Still think its highly underrated to use fs-cache with NASes (usually configured with cachefilesd) for some local dynamically scaling client-side nvme caching. Helps a ton with response times with any NAS thats primarily spinning rust, especially if dealing with decent amount of small files.

I have 4 M.2 drives in RAID0 with HDD and cloud backup. So far so good! I'm sure I am about to regret saying that...

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

#204

Post by rbanffy » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

This discussion got me curious: how much data are you all hoarding?

For me, the media library is less than 4TB. I have some datasets that, put together, go to 20TB or so. All this is handled with a microserver with 4 SATA spinning metal drives (and a RAID-1 NVMe card for the OS and).

I would imagine most HN'ers to be closer to the 4TB bracket than the 40TB one. Where do you sit?

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

#205

Post by noisy_boy » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

My main challenge is that we don't have wired ethernet access in our rooms so even if I bought a mini-NAS and attached it to the router over ethernet, all "clients" will be accessing it over wifi.

Not sure if anyone else has dealt with this and/or how this setup works over wifi.

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

#206

Post by irusensei » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

asymmetric wrote: post #195

irusensei wrote: post #193

I use a 12600H MS-01 with 5x4tb nvme. Love the SFP+ ports since the DAC cable doesn't need ethernet to SFP adapters. Intel vPro is not perfect but works just fine for remote management access. I also plug a bus powered dual ssd enclosure to it which is used for Minio object storage. It's a file server (when did we started calling these "NAS"?) with Samba, NFS but also some database stuff. No VMs or dockers. Just a fi…

Can you expand on the TPM unlocking? Wouldn't this be vulnerable to evil maid attacks?

An evil maid is not on my threat level. I'm more worried about a burglar getting into my house and stealing my stuff and my data with it. It's a 1l PC with more than 10TBs of data so it fits in a small bag.

I start with normal full disk encryption and enrolling my secure boot keys into the device (no vendor or MS keys) then I use systemd-cryptenroll to add a TPM2 key slot into the LUKS device. Automatic unlock won't happen if you disable secure boot or try to boot anything other than my signed binaries (since I've opted to not include the Microsoft keys).

systemd-cryptenroll has a bunch of stricter security levels you can chose (PCRs). Have a look at their documentation.

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

#207

Post by ezschemi » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:27 PM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #168

wpm wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (as the whole house slightly shakes when pickup or trash trucks pass by) I have the same problem, but it is not a problem for my Seagate X16s, that have been going strong for years.

How does this happen? Wooden house? Only 2-3 metres from the road?

Yes, it is a cheaply built wooden house, as is typical in Southern California, from the 70s. The backside of the house is directly at the back alley, where the trash bins and through traffic are (see [1] for an example). The NAS is maybe 4m away from the trash bins.

[1] https://images.app.goo.gl/uviWh9B293bpE1i97

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

#208

Post by ezschemi » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:30 PM UTC

atmanactive wrote: post #153

ezschemi wrote: post #143

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…

Which load, 250MB/s? Modern NVMes are rated for ~20x speeds. Running at such a low bandwidth, they'll stay at idle temperatures at all times.

Fair point! I agree. The NAS sits in a corner with no airflow/ventilation and there is no AC here. In the corner it does get 95F-105F in late summer and I did not want to take the risk of it getting too hot.

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

#209

Post by toast0 » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:30 PM UTC

lmz wrote: post #136

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…

Not many people have fiber at home. Copper 10gig is power hungry and demands good cabling.

> Copper 10gig is power hungry and demands good cabling.

Power hungry yes, good cabling maybe?

I run 10G-Base-T on two Cat5e runs in my house that were installed circa 2001. I wasn't sure it would work, but it works fine. The spec is for 100 meter cable in dense conduit. Most home environments with twisted pair in the wall don't have runs that long or very dense cabling runs, so 10g can often work. Cat3 runs probably not worth trying at 10G, but I've run 1G over a small section of cat3 because that's what was underground already.

I don't do much that really needs 10G, but I do have a 1G symmetric connection and I can put my NAT on a single 10G physical connection and also put my backup NAT router in a different location with only one cable run there... thr NAT routers also do NAS and backup duty, so I can have a little bit of physical separation between them plus I can reboot one at a time without losing NAT.

Economical consumer oriented 10g is coming soon, lots of announcements recently and reasonableish products on aliexpress. All of my current 10G NICs are used enterprise stuff, and the switches are used high end (fairly loud) SMB. I'm looking forward to getting a few more ports in the not too distant future.

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

#210

Post by karczex » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:30 PM UTC

That's cool, except that NAND memories are horrible to hoard data. It has to be powered all the time as cells needs to be refreshed periodically and if you exceed threshold of like 80 percent of occupied storage you will get huge performance penalty due to internal memory organization.