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

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

#61

Post by 88 » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 6:59 PM UTC

StillBored wrote: post #50

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 reason…

I’ve done this (JBOD with USB 3.0 drives on a Pi 4) and it’s surprisingly effective.

I can easily saturate the 1G NIC which is more than sufficient for my use case.

I don’t use RAID or ZFS so neither the CPU or RAM are limiting factors.

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

#62

Post by conk » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 7:16 PM UTC

dingaling wrote: post #44

ashtonkem wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

802.3bt can provide higher power, easily enough to run a few HDDs but there are few switches on the market that offer 802.3bt. Almost nothing available for the residential/consumer space.

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

#63

Post by francis_t_catte » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 7:20 PM UTC

Naac wrote: post #48

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 tr…

Hm, rack mounted fiberchannel drive enclosures exist (~$100 used on fleabay, usually sans disk trays), but that'd require a fiberchannel card in your server, direct attach copper (or fiber) cabling, and driver finagling.

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

#64

Post by giobox » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 7:23 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #39

_ea1k wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this regularly with RPi projects. They are interesting, but the costs are often at least as high as an, often more powerful, x86 equivalent.

Keep in mind that the original goal of the Raspberry Pi foundation was directed toward education. Raspberry Pi has inspired a lot of people to get their hands dirty with Linux and embedded systems, even if it’s not the optimal device from a pure engineering perspective. In that regard, I’d call the Raspberry Pi a resounding success.

This NAS board is only for the Pi CM4 "Compute Module" - that is aimed at enterprise/embedded solutions, not education like the standard Pi boards.

I think for this, it's absolutely appropriate to compare to other solutions on market. Even the official Pi foundation data sheet describes CM4 as for "deeply embedded applications".

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/cm4/cm4-datasheet.pdf

I would also recommend to carefully examine low-cost x86 options, they often do come out ahead given they usually include all the stuff the Pi Foundation don't supply you - a boot volume, case, power supply etc.

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

#65

Post by KaiserPro » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 8:08 PM UTC

Naac wrote: post #48

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 tr…

what you need is a JBOD!

Get a decent[1] external SAS adaptor, a SAS cable, and a second hand enclosure and bob's your noisy uncle!

something like this: https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/dell-powervault-md1220-sto...

https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/hp-z800-z820-external-mini...

Your workstation might even have a sas controller on it already.

This might be overkill, but even with spinny disks you'll be able to get fast random io[2]

[1] subjective. If yours is an enterprise workstation you'll most likley be able to get an official SAS controller for it.

[2] well about 10 iops per drive.

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

#66

Post by _ea1k » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 8:13 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #39

_ea1k wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this regularly with RPi projects. They are interesting, but the costs are often at least as high as an, often more powerful, x86 equivalent.

Keep in mind that the original goal of the Raspberry Pi foundation was directed toward education. Raspberry Pi has inspired a lot of people to get their hands dirty with Linux and embedded systems, even if it’s not the optimal device from a pure engineering perspective. In that regard, I’d call the Raspberry Pi a resounding success.

I agree, and I think they are phenomenal at that. There isn't anything else that combines the versatility, stability, and cost quite so elegantly for single Pi use cases for education or light desktop use. I use several VLC clients feeding monitors, for example, and they are fantastic.

But I also see things like 10 node clusters with a total of 40GB of RAM, a bunch of slow cores, and materials costs of $500+. That's harder for me to understand, outside of the "looks cool" metric.

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

#67

Post by vladvasiliu » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

tutfbhuf wrote: post #34

vladvasiliu wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 driv…

> Regarding the PSU, but you'd need a beefy adapter anyway for running 4 drives How about 2.5 inch drives? I'm thinking about: https://cdn-reichelt.de/bilder/web/xxl_ws/A300/RPI_NAS_4XSAT...

Regarding power usage, I'm not very familiar with how those drives compare [0]. To be honest, power consumption was of interest for the build I was talking about because I wanted it to be fanless (I actually ended up adding a very silent fan, just for peace of mind). For my NAS needs, I'm building in a recycled server, so power usage isn't as much of a concern.

However, I did look for 2.5" drives (the server comes with a 2.5" backplane) and there don't seem to be many "consumer" drives in this format that are both high capacity (>2 TB) and non SMR (I'll be running ZFS). I'm also not looking to spend very much, so SSDs are out.

[0] Seagate specs for 2.5" Barracuda: https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/barracud...

The startup current is 1.2 A under 5V. So if you're running four of them, you'll need 24 W just for the drives. Not sure if the "cheap" enclosures are able to stagger drive startup.

My Gigabyte motherboard cannot, so it would require a PSU large enough to drive both the board (CPU + RAM + etc) and the drives for a little while. So with four drives, you'd be looking at 50 W to be sure it fits.

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

#68

Post by vladvasiliu » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 8:22 PM UTC

tutfbhuf wrote: post #38

roseway4 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went looking for 2.5 inch NAS/ video recorder drives this past weekend and came up empty handed. I’d hoped to install them into a mini-pc NVR. The form-factor doesn’t appear to lend itself to the reliability drive manufacturers target for this class of drive. They’re optimized for high write speeds and very high write loads. You can of course use consumer laptop drives in a NAS, but write speeds will be lower and r…

> speeds will be lower and reliability may suffer 1Gbps is the max. anyways for my home setup, no matter how fast the drive is and I have a backup for important stuff, I'm not dependent on enterprise NAS drives. I want: extremely small, low cost and very low watt usage.

The main issue is that larger capacity drives (> 2TB) seem to be SMR in the 2.5" range. I've looked and haven't found a PMR one (except maybe for "enterprise" drives which cost more than an SSD). Depending on how you want to use those drives, you may be having a bad time. For example when rebuilding a ZFS pool. [0]

If your use case / setup allow you to deal with the complete loss of your array (which, granted, is not 100% likely) or don't use ZFS, then I suppose you could look at Seagate's 2.5 Barracuda line. They're relatively cheap given their capacity and I don't think they're particularly unreliable in and of themselves.

[0] There are many people talking on the internet about ZFS performance with SMR disks. Here's a quick find:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr...

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

#69

Post by eightails » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 11:08 PM UTC

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.

Last year I built a nas system around the Asrock j4105 itx board, using a flashed dell perc h200 as an hba, in a fractal node 304.

I had looked at arm options, including the kobol 64 and boards from hardkernel, but decided that paying a bit more for x86 would make things a lot easier.

It's working well so far: low power draw and near silent, allows for proper zfs on linux support, hardware accelerating transcoding for Jellyfin streams, and at a bit over half the cost of a 6 bay x86 Synology.

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

#70

Post by PragmaticPulp » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 12:19 AM UTC

giobox wrote: post #64

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that the original goal of the Raspberry Pi foundation was directed toward education. Raspberry Pi has inspired a lot of people to get their hands dirty with Linux and embedded systems, even if it’s not the optimal device from a pure engineering perspective. In that regard, I’d call the Raspberry Pi a resounding success.

This NAS board is only for the Pi CM4 "Compute Module" - that is aimed at enterprise/embedded solutions, not education like the standard Pi boards. I think for this, it's absolutely appropriate to compare to other solutions on market. Even the official Pi foundation data sheet describes CM4 as for "deeply embedded applications". https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/cm4/cm4-datasheet.pdf I would also recommend to carefu…

Yes, I know, and I've used it in a project already. The CM4 still operates within the same Raspberry Pi ecosystem. Anyone familiar with the Raspberry Pi software will feel right at home on a CM4.