A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I wish I could find something like this (low power kinda thing) that could take like 40 sata ssds.
I have a whole stack of 500 GB ssds from a datacenter decommission that I've been sitting on.
The 2TB units found their way into my ceph cluster... but those machines are live vms... A smaller little guy that can stack all these 500 gb would be nice to give to my cousin or something and use as offsite backup.
There are adapters to bring then back to regular SATA connectors. Then you could throw HBAs at them. You're going to have a hell of a time managing the heat though. They're lower power, but they're not exactly cool running.
Just in case the only thing you're looking for is the price, I'll save you a click.
Beelink hasn’t announced how much the ME mini will cost or when it will be available for purcahse yet.
The hero we need
Hmm. Let’s say I add 6 SSDs, 2TB each, for a total of 600€. In a RAID6 configuration, that gives me 8TB of storage. Compare that to a classical NAS with 2×8 TB HDDs for a total of 350€.
The HDDs will draw around 4W idle each, 8W in total. Assuming 0.3€/kWh, over a span of 5 years, that is approximately 100€. The power consumption of the SSDs will be negligible.
So, just in terms of storage, the SSD solution is around 33% more expensive over 5 years. If you include the cost of the NAS itself, the price increment is even less noticeable.
HDDs will draw around 4W idle each, 8W in total
Whether your drives are idle is also a very use-case specific thing and I wouldn't spend any time trying to generalize based on that math as a "oh this is how it works for everyone".
In my case, I've got 5 drives all spun up at all times because of torrrent clients, Jellyfin users, and just general media acquisition and public content serving.
This thing would dramatically reduce my power footprint and save me giant buckets of money over it's lifespan while being smaller/faster IO performance/lower noise.
(My current nas sucks down about 120-140w 24/7, so....)
My current nas sucks down about 120-140w 24/7, so…
Ouch. I'm around 50W, and my HW isn't anything special: Ryzen 1700 + 2 HDDs + 1 SSD.
Yeah it's the drives and the controller for all the drives that are making the power usage what it is. I could replace some of the older drives with a newer one and be able to ditch the smaller drives and controllers, but it seems a waste to do that until they die.
Also, I wouldn't mind ditching for a Sufficient(TM) amount of nvme storage, but SSDs aren't actually getting cheaper and are probably going to do the opposite, so I'll likely end up doing uh, nothing,
You can cycle the smaller drives to cold backup, that's not a waste. You do have backups, which RAID is not, right?
But that is neglecting the performance aspect.
Something like this can be very good for offloading large amounts of data onto a parity backed array either to be moved to a proper long term storage solution later or to be actively worked.
High resolution / bitrate footage comes to mind, where you may be offloading multiple cameras at once and need high write performance.
It's pretty unlikely that SSDs will have price parity with spinning rust anytime soon, but the value in them has always been performance.
The ME mini features 12GB of LPDDR5-4800 memory, which means the RAM will be soldered to the mainboard and not user upgradeable.
Aaaaand I'm out.
Edit: Hijacking my own comment to update the update
Update: The Beelink ME mini is priced at 1295 CNY in China, which is about $177 at the current exchange rate. It’s likely to cost a bit more outside of China.
Eh, 12GB is plenty for me. I'm currently using ~3GB out of 16GB, so I'm nowhere close to that cap. My NAS really doesn't do much.
I mean, that's fine if that works for you, but consider more than just your current situation. If you ever wanted to upgrade it or it ever failed sometime in the future, you'd be boned. Personally I have had RAM fail and it cost me about $8 and 10 minutes to repair, rather than several hundred dollars replacing the entire machine.
Sure. I just don't see myself needing more than 8GB RAM, especially w/ fast NVMe drives as swap. It's a simple NAS running Jellyfin (max 1-2 clients) and a handful of other services.
If I need more RAM, chances are I'll also need more CPU as well, in which case a larger upgrade is in order. If I truly only need more RAM, I could pretty easily move some services to an SBC like a Raspberry Pi.
It's certainly a bummer, but not a deal breaker. If the price is right and I can find inexpensive enough NVMe drives, I can compromise a bit on RAM.
especially w/ fast NVMe drives as swap
These won't be fast, as detailed in the OP:
Since Intel’s Alder Lake-N processors only have 9 PCIe lanes which have to be shared between the SSDs and other hardware, the M.2 slots include five PCIe 3.0 single-lane connections, and one PCIe 3.0 x2 connection
PCIe 3.0 is 1 GB/s per lane. So nothing life changing, but still reasonably fast (way faster a HDD). If you rarely need swap, you should be fine for the few times you do.
Fair enough, mate. Good luck.
Solderer ram is slightly more power efficient. And this is probably a laptop board.
That said, 12gb is slightly too low for my liking. Though an N200 CPU does not have much headroom to upgrade for anyway.
Yeah that's just so dumb. Also, i wouldn't be comfortable with the OS on eMMC storage. That's hardly known for reliability. So close and yet so far.
Are people really doing NAS with SSD? Not just for cache?
Yep. Smaller, more energy efficient (extremes expensive electricity here, over 1€/kW at peak time summers), and more temperature resiliant (had to shut the rust based nas down in peak summer months as it could not keep drives cool enough with 3k rpm ippc fans)
11x 4tb drives in mine. Raidz3. Paired with a Xeon and 64gb of ram. All in a 5L case.
Yes, for purposes of noise, size, speed and power efficiency
If you live in a small place and dont have massive storage needs, it can make sense for the sake of the quietness.
This. I can't afford reliable always-on storage now, but I plan to build for SSDs rather than HDDs because I don't have a separate room to put it into.
I've been on the lookout for a quiet, inexpensive NAS that I can put under my bed and forget about. I currently have 2x8TB in a mirror, and I'm only using 2-3TB.
In fact, I might even feel comfortable eliminating the RAID w/ SSDs once I clean up our backup strategy (yes, RAID isn't a backup, I know and I feel bad).
More reliable, less power draw than HDDs, faster and far more space efficient.
Unless you are data hoarding random torrents, 6 to 12 TB is plenty.
More reliable
Heavily depends. If you want to use it as long-term cold storage you absolutely should not use SSDs, they're losing data when left unpowered for too long. While HDDs are also not perfect in retaining data forever, they won't fail as quickly when left on a shelf.
HDDs die faster when running because they have to spin though.
To my knowledge it isn't them constantly running that wears them out most, but spinning up and down very often. Weren't NAS drives designed to never spin down for that very reason?
This is partially true but SSD's do not spin at all.
I have had many a NAS drive fail on me in the past.
Good and true point, but arguably most NASs are built to be used, not to be not-used…
I have a long-term dream to build a fanless SSD-powered NAS
Self-hosted, silent, fast - what's not to love, aside from steep price tag?
SSDs dominant failure modes of catastrophic failure?
The dominant failure mode of an SSD is to become read-only. There's no data loss there...
Depends on the SSD. I've only ever had one SSD become read only, and I've seen a lot of failed SSDs.
I'm considering it. Our storage needs are modest (8TB capacity, 2-3TB stored), our HDDs are getting long in the tooth, and I want to downsize so it can fit under my bed and plug directly into the router (it's currently connecting over wifi). So something relatively inexpensive could convince me to switch.
I was just thinking "bah ssd, that'll be expensive" but a quick search on Amazon suggests prices have dropped quite a bit.
12Gb soldered on memory though. That's a shame.
That's quite the RAM for a NAS, no? I think mine has 512MB.
Using a machine like this just as a NAS is a bit of waste. It's a full blown PC that would work very nicely as a home server for Jellyfin etc. The RAM will limit the utility, though.
ZFS needs a lot of ram
For those zettabyte SSDs 😁 ?
I don't know what it is except the acronym, why whould someone use ZFS?
ZFS is powerful for reliability and data protection. It is designed to hold lots of data and to tolerate hardware failures. One key aspect of ZFS is that it caches data in ram for reads so having lots of ram speeds up read performance.
Thanks!