Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 261 posts

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

#71

Post by moondev »

geerlingguy wrote: post #39
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.

Looks like it only draws 45w which could allow this to be powered over POE++ with a splitter, but it has an integrated AC input and PSU - that's impressive regardless considering how small it is but not set up for PD or POE

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

#72

Post by Havoc »

turnsout wrote: post #43
Havoc wrote: post #8

I've been running one of these quad nvme mini-NAS for a while. They're a good compromise if you can live with no ECC. With some DIY shenanigans they can even run fanless If you're running on consumer nvmes then mirrored is probably a better idea than raidz though. Write amplification can easily shred consumer drives.

I’m a TrueNAS/FreeNAS user, currently running an ECC system. The traditional wisdom is that ECC is a must-have for ZFS. What do you think? Is this outdated?

Ultimately comes down to how important the data is to you. It's not really a technical question but one of risk tolerance

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

#73

Post by bhouston »

I am currently running a 8 4TB NVMe NAS via OpenZFS on TrueNAS Linux. It is good but my box is quite large. I made this via a standard AMD motherboard with both built-in NVMe slots as well as a bunch of expansion PCEi cards. It is very fast.

I was thinking of replacing it with a Asustor FLASHSTOR 12, much more compact form factor and it fits up to 12 NVMes. I will miss TrueNAS though, but it would be so much smaller.

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

#74

Post by sandreas »

samhclark wrote: post #61
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…

I think you're right generally, but I wanna call out the ODROID H4 models as an exception to a lot of what you said. They are mostly upgradable (SODIMM RAM, SATA ports, M.2 2280 slots), and it does support in-band ECC which kinda checks the ECC box. They've got a Mini-ITX adapter for $15 so it can fit into existing cases too. No IPMI and not very many NVME slots. So I think you're right that a good mATX board could b…

Well, if you would like to go mini (with ECC and 2.5G) you could take a look at this one:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006369887180.html

Not totally upgradable, but at least pretty low cost and modern with an optional SATA + NVMe combination for Proxmox. Shovel in an enterprise SATA and a consumer 8TB WD SN850x and this should work pretty good. Even Optane is supported.

IPMI could be replaced with NanoKVM or JetKVM...

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

#75

Post by geek_at »

samhclark wrote: post #61
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…

I think you're right generally, but I wanna call out the ODROID H4 models as an exception to a lot of what you said. They are mostly upgradable (SODIMM RAM, SATA ports, M.2 2280 slots), and it does support in-band ECC which kinda checks the ECC box. They've got a Mini-ITX adapter for $15 so it can fit into existing cases too. No IPMI and not very many NVME slots. So I think you're right that a good mATX board could b…

Not sure about the odroid but I got myself the nas kit from friendly elec. With the largest ram it was about 150 bucks and comes with 2,5g ethernet and 4 NVME slots. No fan and keeps fairly cool even under load.

Running it with encrypted zfs volumes and even with a 5bay 3.5 Inch HDD dock attached via USB

https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/CM3588_NAS_Kit

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

#76

Post by jeffbee »

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…

> less power consuming than a desktop

Not really seeing that in these minis. Either the devices under test haven't been optimized for low power, or their Linux installs have non-optimal configs for low power. My NUC 12 draws less than 4W, measured at the wall, when operating without an attached display and with Wi-Fi but no wired network link. All three of the boxes in the review use at least twice as much power at idle.

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

#77

Post by leptons »

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.

> moving from SSDs for my NAS to solid state.

SSD = Solid State Drive

So you're moving from solid state to solid state?

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

#78

Post by fnord77 »

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…

these little boxes are perfect for my home

My use case is a backup server for my macs and cold storage for movies.

6x2Tb drives will give me a 9Tb raid-5 for $809 ($100 each for the drives, $209 for the nas).

Very quiet so I can have it in my living room plugged into my TV. I have no room for a big noisy server.

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

#79

Post by 1oooqooq »

I will wait until the have AMD efficient chip for one very simple reason: AMD graciously allow ECC on some* cpus.

*well, they allowed on all CPUs, but after zen3 they saw how much money intel was making and joined in. now you must get a "PRO" cpu, to get ECC support, even on mobile (but good luck finding ECC sodimm).

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

#80

Post by qwertox »

wyager wrote: post #31
qwertox wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is full ECC, the CPU supports it (AMD Pro variant).

DDR5 ECC is not good enough. What if you have faulty RAM and ECC is constantly correcting it without you knowing it? There's no value in that. You need the OS to be informed so that you are aware of it. It also does not protect errors which occur between the RAM and the CPU.

This is similar to HDDs using ECC. Without SMART you'd have a problem, but part of SMART is that it allows you to get a count of ECC-corrected errors so that you can be aware of the state of the drive.

True ECC takes the role of SMART in regards of RAM, it's just that it only reports that: ECC-corrected errors.

On a NAS, where you likely store important data, true ECC does add value.

Post reply on HN