Interesting NAS hardware

danb35

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Tigersharke

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It's ARM so it won't run FreeNAS, so therefore OT, but it does look like a slick little package for a Linux-based NAS:
I agree, it looks good, has a lot of decent features. A small home NAS size, or for a small business that has no future need to expand it. I wonder if someone in FreeBSD community might get one in order to work on making it functional for those who might want that hardware.
 

danb35

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I do wonder, though, how they figure that 2x 18650 batteries will provide any kind of useful UPS. At a nominal voltage of 3.7V, that's a grand total of 23.3 watt-hours of energy. That's... not very much. Unless it's only there to let the system cleanly (and immediately) shut down when power fails...
 

Tigersharke

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I do wonder, though, how they figure that 2x 18650 batteries will provide any kind of useful UPS. At a nominal voltage of 3.7V, that's a grand total of 23.3 watt-hours of energy. That's... not very much. Unless it's only there to let the system cleanly (and immediately) shut down when power fails...
Hmm. I didn't recognize what their UPS solution was. You may be right that it is intended for a clean shutdown or possibly a more immediate backup for a short period, since MANY who would use such a device (NAS) would think to have a real UPS-- if it is essential that the NAS remain on at all times. They should probably clarify this detail in their future literature.
 

Evertb1

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If I would forget for a moment I am a practical guy I would like to have one. It has a very high must-have look.
 

Constantin

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It is decent, it looks great, and it's likely a step up from Synology, Qnap, and ReadyNAS as basic file-servers go. These OEMs likely don't appreciate this competitor since it can do some things that their hardware can't (i.e. dual PSUs, for example). But are they quaking in their boots? Unlikely, they are way too entrenched may very well see this as market-discovery opportunity.

However, the lack of proper ZFS support would be a deal breaker for me. This board does not seem to use ECC RAM, as the CPU doesn't mention it in the specs (unless I'm missing something) and the price point also suggests no ECC being used on board. Plus, the grand total of 4GB of RAM is soldered in place. Given all the code bloat today, that will likely limit this unit to just serving files.
 

jon_2112

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I do wonder, though, how they figure that 2x 18650 batteries will provide any kind of useful UPS. At a nominal voltage of 3.7V, that's a grand total of 23.3 watt-hours of energy. That's... not very much. Unless it's only there to let the system cleanly (and immediately) shut down when power fails...

I think that's exactly what it would be for.
 

danb35

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However, the lack of proper ZFS support would be a deal breaker for me.
If it runs Ubuntu on a 64-bit kernel, ZFS should work just fine. Yes, it'd be without ECC, but ECC isn't required for ZFS to work. And 4 GB would be plenty for ZFS without the overhead of FreeNAS, though I agree it'd be a little light to also run (say) all of my jails.
 

HoneyBadger

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Cute idea. I do have a bit of a bone to pick with this though:

  • 5x SATA 3.0
  • M.2 SATA Slot (shared with one SATA 3.0)
A little annoying, so I could have either that five-bay hotswap case fully populated, or four bays and an M.2 slot ... and one empty drive bay sitting there mocking me? Shame.

Also, six drives is my comfort zone for RAIDZ2/double-parity setups. Shame it couldn't be just the smidgen better to get this part.

The "integrated UPS" part is interesting. If it's got enough juice to keep the chips/drives going for long enough to flush a pending txg, they might be able to cheat their way into having a "sort-of-non-volatile-RAM" style solution. Cut power to the NICs so no new data shows up, flush the txg, detach and shutdown safely.
 

danb35

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The "integrated UPS" part is interesting. If it's got enough juice to keep the chips/drives going for long enough to flush a pending txg
As I think about it a little more--the PSU is 12V/10A, or 120W. Those two 18650s (at 3150 mAh) would run the system at full load for 10 minutes--plenty of time to shut it down. They won't let you run the system for an hour on battery the way I'd like, but a clean shutdown should be very do-able.
 

CPP-IT

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A little annoying, so I could have either that five-bay hotswap case fully populated, or four bays and an M.2 slot ... and one empty drive bay sitting there mocking me? Shame.

I looks like the M2 slot is meant to be shared with the vertically positioned USB3 port. (pure guessing)
 

Constantin

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...so I could have either that five-bay hotswap case fully populated, or four bays and an M.2 slot ... Also, six drives is my comfort zone for RAIDZ2/double-parity setups. Shame it couldn't be just the smidgen better to get this part...

IIRC, some of the c3xxx boards do similar things re: PCIe and attached m.2 devices. You get one or the other.

i also agree that 6 drives is a good starting point re: redundancy. This is a entry-level NAS whose sole purpose is serving files and which will likely do this very efficiently. It also offers some significant improvements over the competition: UPS, dual PS-capable, etc. that some folk might care about a lot.

But 6 drives would improve the ratio re data vs. parity for those who care to have a Z2 or higher level of protection.
 

blueether

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Well it looks they plan support ECC
Gauthier Admin dde6 hours ago
Offering ECC option by using SDRAM chips that have built-in ECC feature
is still in the pipeline. However the SDRAM vendor in question has yet
to release a 8Gb or 16Gb chip for us to be able to offer 2GB or 4GB ECC
RAM. Hopefully mid 2020, we can offer an ECC option, most likely only
2GB.
EDITED
 
Last edited:

HoneyBadger

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Well it looks like the cpu does support ECC
From my reading of those quotes, ECC isn't supported by the chip/SoC, but they're hoping for the delivery of the "built-in ECC memory" that's implemented entirely at the RAM level, without communicating or requiring the CPU to support ECC.
 

blueether

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From my reading of those quotes, ECC isn't supported by the chip/SoC, but they're hoping for the delivery of the "built-in ECC memory" that's implemented entirely at the RAM level, without communicating or requiring the CPU to support ECC.
Yes I see that and had edited my post accordingly ;)
 

Arwen

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Hmmm, that's the same ARM SoC as in my new ARM laptop, RockChip RK3399.

RK3399 does not support;
  • ECC memory
  • More than 4GB of memory
When I get a chance, I intend to run Gentoo Linux on my ARM laptop with ZFS root. (Preferably with ZFS encrypted root, it's a laptop after all).

Those wanting to play with ARM SoCs, there are a lot out there. The same vendor that makes my ARM laptop, makes a small 2 disk NAS using very similar hardware as my ARM laptop.
 
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