Re: NAS

On Thu, Apr 02, 2026 at 09:21:25AM +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 01, 2026 at 06:55:59PM -0700, bch wrote:
> > I?m entertaining the idea of a storage appliance, and wondering: does
> > anybody have a recipe for building their own, or experience with
> > whether or not it?s worth it? I suspect the single biggest issue is
> > getting some small device w enough i/o to hang a RAID set off of it.
> > What are the preferred boards for that. Other option is just treating
> > it like a consumable and getting a buffalo device and accessing via
> > Samba or such and trusting/hoping everything is working well.
> 
> 
> I have done that with a GuruPlug in the past, currently a Quartz64 board,
> and will move on to a Firefly P2S in the near future (hoping to get a SATA
> port mulitplier working on that).

SATA multipliers are not great. First of all, they limit throughput to a
single SATA link (their uplink). Secondary, any problems with a single
device downstream tends to hit the entire group: I've seen instances
where an entire disk group behind a SATA multiplier went offline because
one of the attached disks had failures and it hogged the link.

> Finding devices with enough SATA ports
> and sockets for enough NVMEs is indeed the hard part.

Depends on your needs. I'm using Gigabyte MB10 Datto (OEMed for Datto
NAS appliances) for Ceph nodes - yes, running Linux, but it's a very
standard x86 board so I expect NetBSD to run fine. Supports ECC (important
for storage nodes) and has 6 SATA ports (my setup uses 1 SATA SSD for the
system and 5x SATA disk for storage).

> I think the Pine64
> shop has a few offers that could fit.

Last I checked, aside from the very (expensive) top end, pretty much none
of the ARM boards supported ECC, sadly.

Kind regards,
           Alex.
-- 
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
 looks like work."                                      -- Thomas A. Edison