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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

#31

Post by wyager »

qwertox wrote: post #13
koeng wrote: post #2

Are there any mini NAS with ECC ram nowadays? I recall that being my personal limiting factor

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…

Is this "full" ECC, or just the baseline improved ECC that all DDR5 has?

Either way, on my most recent NAS build, I didn't bother with a server-grade motherboard, figuring that the standard consumer DDR5 ECC was probably good enough.

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

#32

Post by michaelt »

whatever1 wrote: post #23

Question regarding these mini pcs: how do you connect them to plain old hard drives ? Is thunderbolt / usb these days reliable enough to run 24/7 without disconnects like an onboard sata?

Would you not simply buy a regular NAS?

Why buy a tiny, m.2 only mini-NAS if your need is better met by a vanilla 2-bay NAS?

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

#33

Post by blargthorwars »

whatever1 wrote: post #23

Question regarding these mini pcs: how do you connect them to plain old hard drives ? Is thunderbolt / usb these days reliable enough to run 24/7 without disconnects like an onboard sata?

I've run a massive farm (2 petabytes) of ZFS on FreeBSD servers with Zraid over consumer USB for about fifteen years and haven't had a problem: directly attaching to the motherboard USB ports and using good but boring controllers on the drives like the WD Elements series.

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

#34

Post by transpute »

bee_rider wrote: post #14

Should a mini-NAS be considered a new type of thing with a new design goal? He seems to be describing about a desktop worth of storage (6TB), but always available on the network and less power consuming than a desktop. This seems useful. But it seems quite different from his previous (80TB) NAS. What is the idle power draw of an SSD anyway? I guess they usually have a volatile ram cache of some sort built in (is that…

> Should a mini-NAS be considered a new type of thing with a new design goal?

  - Warm storage between mobile/tablet and cold NAS
  - Sidecar server of functions disabled on other OSes
  - Personal context cache for LLMs and agents

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

#35

Post by layer8 »

jeffbee wrote: post #26
whatever1 wrote: post #23

Question regarding these mini pcs: how do you connect them to plain old hard drives ? Is thunderbolt / usb these days reliable enough to run 24/7 without disconnects like an onboard sata?

I've never heard of these disconnects. The OWC ThunderBay works well.

For that money it can make more sense to get a UGreen DXP4800 with built-in N100: https://nas.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-nasync-dxp4800-nas-st...

You can install a third-party OS on it.

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

#36

Post by jkortufor »

jeffbee wrote: post #26
whatever1 wrote: post #23

Question regarding these mini pcs: how do you connect them to plain old hard drives ? Is thunderbolt / usb these days reliable enough to run 24/7 without disconnects like an onboard sata?

I've never heard of these disconnects. The OWC ThunderBay works well.

I have experienced them - I have a B650 AM5 motherboard and if I connect a Orico USB HDD enclosure to the fastest USB ports, the ones comming directly from the AMD CPU (yes, it's a thing now), after 5-10 min the HDD just disappears from the system. Doesn't happen on the other USB ports.

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

#37

Post by TiredOfLife »

whatever1 wrote: post #23

Question regarding these mini pcs: how do you connect them to plain old hard drives ? Is thunderbolt / usb these days reliable enough to run 24/7 without disconnects like an onboard sata?

I have been running usb hdds 24/7 connected to raspberry pi as a nas for 10 years without problems

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

#38

Post by projektfu »

michaelt wrote: post #32
whatever1 wrote: post #23

Question regarding these mini pcs: how do you connect them to plain old hard drives ? Is thunderbolt / usb these days reliable enough to run 24/7 without disconnects like an onboard sata?

Would you not simply buy a regular NAS? Why buy a tiny, m.2 only mini-NAS if your need is better met by a vanilla 2-bay NAS?

Good question. I imagine for the silence and low power usage without needing huge amounts of storage. That said, I own an n100 dual 3.5 bay + m.2 mini PC that can function as a NAS or as anything and I think it's pretty neat for the price.

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

#39

Post by geerlingguy »

dwood_dev wrote: post #21

I love reviews like these. I'm a fan of the N100 series for what they are in bringing low power x86 small PCs to a wide variety of applications. One curiosity for @geerlingguy, does the Beelink work over USB-C PD? I doubt it, but would like to know for sure.

That, I did not test. But as it's not listed in specs or shown in any of their documentation, I don't think so.

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

#40

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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