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[Mercutio]

Server and workstation hardware prices typically fall off a cliff about four years after they're released. X399 + 1950X + 128GB RAM combos are selling for ~$800 on ebay now. Hopefully we see the same trend for Ampere.

(edit: typed in the wrong old CPU. Derp).

 

[LunarMist]

I avoided the NADs without ECC. Surely the Ryzen will advance their embedded ones.

That is a hell of a capable platform for this usecase. No clue if they'll ever be reasonably priced on the ebay market some day.

I also like the idea of these types of boards for NAS or other small compute purposes that use the lower TDP AMD mobile CPUs. If they worked with ECC it would be almost perfect for my needs.

AMD mobile CPUs power new mini-ITX motherboards — Zen 3 or Zen 4 chip onboard, two M.2 slots, and four 2.5G Ethernet ports

Mobile Zen 3 and Zen 4 chips make their way to the desktop.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[Chewy509]

IIRC Ampere's philosophy is to have lots of modest cores for things like running web servers that don't need to be insanely powerful. File services probably also qualify for that.

Sounds a lot like the approach Sun took with the UltraSPARC T1 and T2 series.

 

[sedrosken]

Even the Intel N100 is a hell of a platform for low power appliances like NAS, routers, etc. 4 Alder E-cores in a 6W package? They perform roughly the same IPC-wise as Haswell, reportedly. I have one in a little router box I'm running pfSense on now -- the dual-LAN Shuttle mini PC with the Celeron N4000 died mysteriously and I took the opportunity to upgrade, it has 4 i226 2.5GbE interfaces and now I can segregate my network a little without needing a layer 3 switch for trunking VLAN traffic. I wonder what a proper low-power server chip leveraging these cores would look like -- something with, say, 10 or so within a 20W power envelope.

 

[Handruin]

I bought a Beelink Mini S12 Pro for about $145 last October that has an N100 inside with 16GB RAM and 500GB nvme storage and it has worked well so far. I ditched the windows 11 and installed Proxmox on it and host a couple of VMs, mainly one to run my HomeAssistant for my house. It sips barely any power and has been surprisingly stable.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm starting to see 16-port Broadcom 9400-based cards on Ebay for under $200. These are the Tri-mode devices that can handle U.2/U.3/EDSFF disks in addition to SATA and SAS.

I'm terrible at 3D modeling but it seems like I could print a 1U external enclosure out of ABS (~100°C heat resistance) to use since NVMe backplanes aren't exactly a commodity item yet. Just build in wire guides and places to screw drives down.

 

[LunarMist]

I thought that the 9500 series was supposed to be used with U.3. The relationships between U.2, U.3 and PCIe speeds are not entirely clear for me.

I'm sure there are plenty of people that will take your basic 3D design and finsh/print it for you. I'm not really a fan of plastic enclosures though.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm sure there are plenty of people that will take your basic 3D design and finsh/print it for you. I'm not really a fan of plastic enclosures though.

I thought I saw support for u.3 in the product brief. It's easy enough to check that, but even u.2 opens up the option to get higher density and endurance drives than consumer stuff.

As for 3D printing, I have access to a maker space. A zillion years ago, I knew how to use CAD well enough to work in two dimensions but 3D breaks my brain. It might be fun to try to work it out. I feel like there's a level of utility there.

 

[LunarMist]

No, it is a U.2 HBA. U.3 drives will work on U.2 controllers (at slower PCIe 3.x speeds), but not vice versa. All the pinouts and backenplanes, etc. are what confuses me. It should be possible to connect 4x U.2/U.3 drives or 2x U.2/U.3 drives and up to 8x SATA/SAS if I understand correctly.

 

[Mercutio]

I'd take it. Those Broadcom controllers also top out at 12Gbps, which which is clearly less than ideal for a PCIe gen 4 drive anyway.

 

[LunarMist]

I suppose the bandwith to each drive depends on the number in use. The total is limited to 8000MB/sec. due to the 8 PCIe 3.x lanes. Two NVMe woudl max it out. The SAS drives are operating up to 12Gbps, but 8 of those would also take all the bandwidth. I don't know if people use both at the same time or what. I hope you get one and do some testing of it.

 

[Mercutio]

Something mildly obnoxious: Adler Lake Celerons are actually pretty respectable CPUs with extremely low wattage and it's pretty easy to find ITX boards with 2.5GbE and a Celeron N100, probably with a couple m.2 and maybe 4 or 6 SATA ports and an 8 lane PCIe slot. Perfect for a NAS build, until you notice that the platform only supports 16GB RAM. As power hogging as contemporary Intel is, AMD doesn't exactly have anything I'd call ultra low voltage.

Lame.

 

[LunarMist]

It's always been like that for Alder Lake-N. That 16GB limitation also sucks for the Windows, but it is supposed to be CHEAP.

Products formerly Alder Lake-N

ark.intel.com

Intel® Processor N100 (6M Cache, up to 3.40 GHz) Product Specifications

Intel® Processor N100 (6M Cache, up to 3.40 GHz) quick reference guide including specifications, features, pricing, compatibility, design documentation, ordering codes, spec codes and more.

ark.intel.com

Is a Celeron in the 7300 series too highly-powered for your needs? https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...ame/232598/products-formerly-alder-laken.html

 

[Mercutio]

I was just about to say that as far as I know, nobody is selling the N305 as a barebones motherboard but no, there it is on AliExpress. Looks like getting the upgraded CPU adds about $100 to the system cost AND I'd have to get it from "Tan Lancheng Products Business Department" but that is definitely a step in the right direction. No useful PCIe, but there's enough I/O there that it might be OK.

 

[sedrosken]

Tell that 16GB limitation to ASRock because they claim their N100M supports up to 32GB. I suppose it's unofficial and the lack of dual channel deals me 3d6 psychic damage every turn but supposedly it works.

 

[LunarMist]

Would you trust a NAS with an unsupported RAAM configuration?

 

[sedrosken]

If it works? Sure. I'm used to being my own support anyway. Now, would I implement this for a client? Hell no. You stick to by the books for liability reasons there.

 

[LunarMist]

I was told that NAS should use ECC if possible. I suppose you just test the crap out of it on the MemTest or some such?

 

[Mercutio]

I was told that NAS should use ECC if possible. I suppose you just test the crap out of it on the MemTest or some such?

Ideally, everything should be ECC. If you're on DDR5, it is.

I've also long-since learned that if an OEM says their platform does something out of line with specs, it's generally true under at least some condition. That might require a particular set of HCL DIMMs, but if I'm doing anything important, I'm doing that anyway.

I think a combination of that i3 N305 motherboard + a 6xSAS + 4xU.2 backplane and some aluminum sheet metal and a little 3D printing could be pretty decent. "Perfect" would have a 10Gb or better NIC and not rely on m.2 to u.2 adapters but we all know that's not going to happen on a low cost or low power platform.

 

[LunarMist]

It is not true ECC and you know that.
What are you building that strange little NAS for?

 

[Mercutio]

I'm still weighing my options since I don't particularly want to buy components for Aliexpress. The idea would be a local backup system for a customer who wants that to stay in-house.

 

[Mercutio]

Ugreen's NAS Kickstarter is ALL OVER youtube right now. Might as well bring it up here as well. I feel like all the options they offer are flawed in their own way, like using 10GbaseT on the NVMe model and not supporting m.2 drives larger than 4TB, but the prices during the kickstarter period are really pretty reasonable.

 

[LunarMist]

I would not buy that kind of product since the software may be terrible and only supported for a limited time. I'm not familiar with the UGREEN 绿联 UGOS. Maybe you can install other OS/apps, but that is not worth the hassle for most people.

 

[Handruin]

I've seen a few review and the units do look decent enough, especially at their kickstart prices but I'm with Lunar, I'm not sure I want to get locked in to a lesser known NAS builder's ecosystem and OS.

 

[Mercutio]

It is apparently possible to ditch the Ugreen OS, although the 10Gb NIC they use isn't terribly well supported by BSD *nix and you have to take an extra step to replace the boot drive out and void the system warranty before you can do so.

The 8 bay model is half the cost of Synology 8 version. That's a trend I'd like to see continue.

On the other hand, I've also found this

And some larger printed chassis for those who might have 400^3 3D printers (not me; the biggest ones I can use are only 350x320). Down side to those is that they don't have backplanes. You have to run SFF 8087 to 4x SATA and probably do some nutty stuff with Y-adapted SATA power.

 

[LunarMist]

Assuming the post-kickstand price is correct, the 8-bay Ugreen is $1500 with 8GB of RAM and an i5-1235U. It has 2x 10GbE and one PCIe slot.
The Syndology DS1823xs+ is $1800 with 8GB of RAM. It has one 10GbE and one PCIe slot. QNAP doesn't have exactly a matching product, so would be more expensive or less with a weaker CPU. I've been pleased enough with all of my X73As, but they don't have the CPU oomph for encrupted RAID6 (ZFS Z2) at full speed. In general QNAP have two PCIe, which I find useful.

 

[LunarMist]

And some larger printed chassis for those who might have 400^3 3D printers (not me; the biggest ones I can use are only 350x320). Down side to those is that they don't have backplanes. You have to run SFF 8087 to 4x SATA and probably do some nutty stuff with Y-adapted SATA power.

Is that 3D box metallica and grounded? If it is some kind of thermoplastic resin alone, then you will want to create a grounding shield, but it still won't conduct heat well.

 

[Mercutio]

Is that 3D box metallica and grounded? If it is some kind of thermoplastic resin alone, then you will want to create a grounding shield, but it still won't conduct heat well.

There are a number of heat resistant polymers that you can use in consumer 3D printing. ABS (good for 90+ C) is the first one that comes to mind, although not every print head can get hot enough to use it. Your plugged-in PSU will be a path to ground in literally any PC case.

Assuming the post-kickstand price is correct, the 8-bay Ugreen is $1500 with 8GB of RAM and an i5-1235U.

Sure, but it's $975 right now. We both know those things aren't going to ship at MSRP for the overwhelming majority of their time on the market.

 

[LunarMist]

For some reasons I noticed that nAS is unnaturally slow for file deletions. For example, deleting ~93,000 files of about 3.7GB takes forever in Windows and is faster, but still quite slow on the NAS itself. In Windows it literally takes just seconds to delete from local drives, the longest part being to accept that the files won't fit in the recycler bins. Just why is deletion so slow on a NAS?

 

[Mercutio]

Here is a fun thing that I just discovered: Samba supports Windows Previous Versions. This can be really interesting when combined with your zfs or btrfs snapshots. I'd never even considered whether or not Previous Versions worked or not, but there it is, and not terribly difficult to set up.

Here's a link that fairly specifically describes how to make it work with Debian based *nix.

 

[Mercutio]

45drives is offering an 8 3.5" Bay SAS chassis for $600. It supports an ITX motherboard and FlexATX PSU.

45HomeLab Store

I have a line on another Lenovo SR630v1. Dual 500W platinum PSUs, 4xu.2, 8xSAS, 2x10GbE + 4xGbE and 80(!) 2GHz threads for $400, and I can use the scads of 8 and 16GB DIMMs I already have. It's actually cheaper to buy that whole system than to get a 4x or 6x u.2 5.25" backplane.

Something like that is less a NAS and more a universal homelab, but I can't imagine what would beat that setup for overall flexibility and initial cost. It's clearly overkill for a lot of use cases, but it would be a dream setup for Proxmox + TrueNAS and every weird project you've ever wanted to mess with.

 

[Handruin]

I watched a review on that new 45 drives 8-bay and it looks interesting. Not sure the chassis is worth the $600 given what else is out there. I've been looking into Sliger NAS chassis for a smaller NAS build and they're a bunch less, but also rack mount vs desktop like the 45 drives. The Sliger cases don't have a SAS backplane either which is a bummer.

That Lenovo does sound nice for the price. Personally I'm looking to find a better balance for reduce power consumption and reduced noise for my homelab stuff.

 

[Handruin]

This guy's review or overview of that new 45 drives chassis has some more details and you can see some of the inner workings. He's a little dry and quirky but he gets the info across.

 

[Mercutio]

I have a pair of ancient Norco 24 bay SAS chassis. They were originally meant to have a PC in them, but at this point they are drives-only enclosures. Each of them currently has one backplane that doesn't work and given how long I've had these things, I expect that more will break down as well. In their favor, those guys have Seasonic 700W Platinum PSUs and a row of 120mm fans inside and they're solidly built. I barely hear whatever the drives inside them are doing. I'll be sad to see them go.

I don't think I need four dozen 3.5" drives for bulk storage any more. I've been thinking that the "big" 45Drives enclosure as an alternative, but I also don't know if I really want to spend $1000 basically just to get native USB3 ports and zero hot-swap bays.
I'm also contemplating the idea of just buying spare SAS/u.2 backplanes and 3D printing trays that will work with them.

 

[Handruin]

I decided to try a new NAS build so I ordered some parts today. I want this new NAS to consume a bunch less electricity compared to my current old NAS. I chose to use:

Motherboard: Supermicro A2SDi-8C-HLN4F

• 8-core Intel Atom C3758 (25W TDP)
• 12 SATA ports, of which there are 2 SFF-8643 miniSAS HD connectors for 8 SATA ports
• 1 - PCIe 3.0 x4
• BMC

RAM: 64GB ECC RDIMMs (2 x 32GB Micron)
Boot storage: 1TB WD Blue SN580 NVMe 1TB
Network: Mellanox Connect-X 3 10Gb SFP+
PSU: Seasonic focus px-750 platinum
Case: Sliger 4U CX4712
HDDs: (still deciding but leaning towards 8 x Ultrastar DC HC570 - 22TB and 4 x 4TB SSD)
OS: Likely Ubuntu Server or I may try TrueNAS. Storage/raid via ZFS.

 

[LunarMist]

That's a pretty wimpy old CPU for a new 2024 build.

 

[ddrueding]

Low power, should keep up with 8x Ultrastar in RAID0

And PCIe 3x4 is good for.....100GBps?

 

[Mercutio]

That seems pretty sweet to me. If Handruin already has his CPU horsepower elsewhere, there's no reason to give that system any more than that Atom has and it's hard to argue with a 10GbE NIC, ECC RAM and drives at local speed.

Are you just running the system over direct-attach or do you have a 10GbE switch somewhere?

 

[LunarMist]

I was assuming RAID-Z2. I have older NAS with similar CPUs and there can easily be bottlenecks with 10Gb. If you encrypt it will be even worse.

 

[Handruin]

That seems pretty sweet to me. If Handruin already has his CPU horsepower elsewhere, there's no reason to give that system any more than that Atom has and it's hard to argue with a 10GbE NIC, ECC RAM and drives at local speed.

Are you just running the system over direct-attach or do you have a 10GbE switch somewhere?

I only plan to use this to manage the storage, my compute is in other systems.

I have a brocade icx7250 that has 8 x 10Gb that I use to connect a few devices and an uplink to my ubiquiti enterprise 8 that I use for my access points.