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

cnx-software.com

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

#41

Post by hnaccount141 »

youngtaff wrote: post #31
geerlingguy wrote: post #19

There are a few people currently working on NAS boards based on the CM4. A few different approaches in terms of chipsets used and performance targets. I'm trying to track them in this GitHub issue [1] but a couple people have remained more or less anonymous as they don't want to attract attention too early. The single PCIe lane is the biggest limitation if you're looking for raw speed (350 MB/sec is kind of the upper…

Have you come across anyone producing a PoE board for the CM4 - just looking for a network port, USB and perhaps SD card (similar to a Ubquiti Cloud Key)? (the Gumstix camera board is overkill for my needs)

Waveshare has one. Haven't used it personally but it seems to suit your needs. Though at ~$50 you're probably better off just getting a Pi 4B + PoE hat.

https://www.waveshare.com/compute-module-4-poe-board.htm

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

#42

Post by m463 »

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.

I was thinking the same thing.

I love the pi and have many of them. But their beauty seems to come out at the edge where things are low power and they replace nonsense IOT devices.

To replace a server or desktop is a stretch. That's where using a pi is death by 10,000 papercuts. The super-competitive low end PC market gives you so many things for free, like good power supplies, a wide variety of cases and silly things like power switches and a clock with a battery.

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

#43

Post by ashtonkem »

youngtaff wrote: post #31
geerlingguy wrote: post #19

There are a few people currently working on NAS boards based on the CM4. A few different approaches in terms of chipsets used and performance targets. I'm trying to track them in this GitHub issue [1] but a couple people have remained more or less anonymous as they don't want to attract attention too early. The single PCIe lane is the biggest limitation if you're looking for raw speed (350 MB/sec is kind of the upper…

Have you come across anyone producing a PoE board for the CM4 - just looking for a network port, USB and perhaps SD card (similar to a Ubquiti Cloud Key)? (the Gumstix camera board is overkill for my needs)

Can POE provide enough power to turn SATA drives? I kind of figured for a NAS it probably makes sense to go with a regular power supply, especially since it’ll be mounted in an easy to access location for drive replacement.

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

#44

Post by dingaling »

ashtonkem wrote: post #43
youngtaff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you come across anyone producing a PoE board for the CM4 - just looking for a network port, USB and perhaps SD card (similar to a Ubquiti Cloud Key)? (the Gumstix camera board is overkill for my needs)

Can POE provide enough power to turn SATA drives? I kind of figured for a NAS it probably makes sense to go with a regular power supply, especially since it’ll be mounted in an easy to access location for drive replacement.

802.3at specifies max 30W at the output port at 600mA so in theory you could shunt that to 5V and get about 5A after losses. Enough to spin up a 3.5" SATA.

But most consumer retail PoE switches are only .3af compliant which give 15W minus transmission losses.

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

#45

Post by hansihe »

youngtaff wrote: post #31
geerlingguy wrote: post #19

There are a few people currently working on NAS boards based on the CM4. A few different approaches in terms of chipsets used and performance targets. I'm trying to track them in this GitHub issue [1] but a couple people have remained more or less anonymous as they don't want to attract attention too early. The single PCIe lane is the biggest limitation if you're looking for raw speed (350 MB/sec is kind of the upper…

Have you come across anyone producing a PoE board for the CM4 - just looking for a network port, USB and perhaps SD card (similar to a Ubquiti Cloud Key)? (the Gumstix camera board is overkill for my needs)

A regular Raspberry Pi with a cheap POE USB-C splitter from Aliexpress works very well.

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mMpvxGV

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

#46

Post by dsr_ »

znpy wrote: post #30
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…

> 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.

I keep saying backup, and other people keep re-saying NAS. These are different.

A NAS can serve as a backup.

Not all backups are suitable as a NAS.

Now, let me restate: Most people have no networks capable of significantly more than 1Gb/s between two hosts in their house. Complaining that a backup server is also attached at 1Gb/s is not going to cause people to discover that they have already purchased 10Gb/s switches, or LACP switches, or even acquire 2.5Gb/s switches.

Of the people who have 10Gb/s switches in their house, approximately none of them are going to look at this very low cost, low performance, low power system and say "yes! this is my new primary backup system!"

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

#47

Post by ausjke »

Use RPi for NAS is really a stretch. Just buy those low-power x86 mini-itx boards with 4GB memory and 4 SATA ports along with gigabit ethernet, they're around $150?

Note the smaller size of RPi-etc makes no sense when you're going to host 4 hard drives anyways which takes quite some space on their own, and you need a decent PSU for the drives too, and a solid case as well, etc.

Just buy those ASRock mini-itx boards at newsegg or somewhere and let RPi do what it's best at.

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

#48

Post by Naac »

Here's what I want, but haven't been able to find:

I already have a beefy server at home ( it's actually a refurbished enterprise workstation, with 24 cores, but read on ).

However it lacks drives. What I ideally want is a a dumb drive bay I could buy, and then connect ( somehow ) to my existing server, so I could use its CPU and RAM.

I don't want this drive bay to have its own CPU, I just want it to hold data and transfer it over some wire. Ideally I would achieve close to gigabit speeds requesting data off of this server/drive bay.

Some options I've explored are those dumb quad storage bays that connect over USB-3. But I was worried about running ZFS over a USB interface, as well as potentially parallel read and writes with the quality of the USB controller.

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

#49

Post by sneak »

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?

I recently picked up two 36 bay sata super micro 4Us on ebay for ~$600 each.

The real cost is drives, not the thing you plug them into.

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

#50

Post by StillBored »

geerlingguy wrote: post #19

There are a few people currently working on NAS boards based on the CM4. A few different approaches in terms of chipsets used and performance targets. I'm trying to track them in this GitHub issue [1] but a couple people have remained more or less anonymous as they don't want to attract attention too early. The single PCIe lane is the biggest limitation if you're looking for raw speed (350 MB/sec is kind of the upper…

Its sorta hard to justify those at the moment, since the XHCI interface on the base Pi4B is more than capable of maximizing the PCIe x1 interface. Basically, you can run a NAS at the capabilities of the machine with random USB3 JBODs.

So a $100 5+ bay USB3 JBOD, RPi4B run over the 1G nic, and a 64-bit arm64 distro (because rasbian will die with modern SATA disks in a larger capacity JBOD) and you have a fairly reasonable low end NAS for basically the price of the disks.

(or just plug in 4 of USB3 easystores/etc and save on the enclosure).

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