After watching Geerling's video on YouTube about building an ARM NAS I almost went that direction -- but opted for a Synology DS918+ instead because my need for a NAS is not just experimental but something that needs to work reliably.
Where did you get that idea? Below are links to Synology acknowledged compatible drives with multiple brands and even that doesn't imply that only these will work:
That's a Synology released four years ago. Contrast with a model released in February this year. Not a single drive non-Synology drive on the HCL larger than 4TB:
It's not a hard requirement to use Synology drives, but on the newer/higher-end models the options to not use Synology drives are very limited. For example the FS2500 only has four models of SSD on the HCL and two are Synology.
IMHO, the price premium for the Synology branded drives is reasonable. Pay for the validated drives. Maintaining a broad HCL is no small task.
The last Synology box I configured, a RS4021xs+, has currently a "System health" status of "Danger: The system is now in a dangerous status". In Storage manager every drive is listed as "Unverified" and with a red triangle. (Seagate ST18000NM disks, so quite common.)
I configured it about a year ago. Before I updated to what was then a beta version of DSM it refused to install all together, which was quite frustrating.
The list of supported drives according to Synology is depressingly short for this model - the only non-Synology or Toshiba drive is a single Western Digital.
I have schucked Western Digital Element drives in my Synology NAS with no issues. Hundreds (maybe thousands?) of people on Reddit are doing this with no issues.
You are right that Synology (or an equivalent appliance) is often best. It's more complicated for geeks and data hoarders once we've been using a Synology for a while.
When people go down the Synology path they are often running apps and doing more than providing a big pool of storage. I'm finding that my needs have changed towards my NAS being only a pool of storage on my local network. It is there as the first tier of backups to speed up disaster recovery. I feel confident that I could move to a more DIY NAS solution because it would only be used for NAS storage.
It's not ideal, but an old desktop is now much better for my app needs, including Plex. Ideally, I'd have a single app box with the power consumption of 4-5 Raspberry Pi. I have only found a couple of ARM server solutions which are fairly old and ARM doesn't have standard sockets etc. because the focus seems to be on SoC instead of replicating what I'm used to with PCs and ATX mobos.
I have used an ARM Synology NAS but found it highly inadequate for running services ... or anything but basic storage, really.
Only the x86 models support running Linux containers, packaging an application for Synology didn't exactly seem easy to to and the UI is almost unusably sluggish and has super confusing UX (it emulates a desktop environment in the browser ... right, very cool).
Running an own standard Linux-based NAS is more effort, but not terribly so. The additional flexibility may be worth it: It makes it quite painless to integrate with other data sources and sinks for backups and stuff and can run a lot of personal services (home automation, budgeting tool, IRC bouncer ...).
There seemed to be change on their low-end stuff when the DS120j/220j came out. The processor and RAM finally seemed enough to not spin off into oblivion, if you avoided the software that catalogs image files.
They are dual-core, 512MB RAM, where the previous DS110j was single core, 128MB RAM and the DS115j was single core, 256MB RAM. The previous models just ran way too close to CPU starvation or swapping hell.
Still happy after 4 years with my Odroid XU4/Cloudshell2 - now runs with Dual 16TB. But yes, it is only a storage backend (for Borg Backups), not much more.
The HD controller? (the main IC in the center of the front-panel board) in my Cloudshell 2 imploded recently, now I am stuck trying to figure out what to do. I really don't want to shell out for a whole new NAS, and the XU4 is still running great after repasting the heatsink... but it randomly loses the drives when there's too much activity (I tried libata.force=1.5G, but no luck).
Likely the USB-Cable from XU4 to HD controller - exchange it. Hardkernel confirmed that their cables were poor quality and resulted in many disconnects. Mine were gone after exchanging cables.
I have to say my Odroid only runs once a week - started remotely through IPSEC for offsite backups. So it is not a 24/7 setup.
It's not the cable - the main IC in the board that the drives plug into "imploded" - there are cracks in package and it's sunken in. I was running it for ~4 years essentially 100% uptime, but took it down in early 2019 and didn't get it set back up until now.
Yes, that makes sense. With the cable I was referring to the random drive disconnects, as I had those, too. About the imploded IC: Not much to do about it - either get a replacement board (well, they are not sold anymore). Or try to recover the Raid 1 disks (if this is what you are using) using an external usb-mount. I heard that the raid is formatted with standard mdadm, so perhaps possible to recover without the original IC. Would be interesting to follow up - please report if you recover your drives somehow.
What happens when the Sinology dies? Do I have to buy another Synology to mount my array again? Does it have to be the same model, or family of models?
I haven't tried pulling one of the drives from my system and trying to read it with another box but I imagine just about any Linux system should be able to read BTRFS drives, no? Under the covers Synology's DSM is Linux with some proprietary apps on top.
Yeah I know at least ASUSTOR's ADM and Synology's DSM are both basically lightweight Linux distros (usually on an older kernel than what you'd expect building something custom), and they use standard Linux storage tooling (for mdadm RAID or btrfs).
I haven't tested it on Synology, but at least on ASUSTOR, the RAID arrays are set up using mdadm internally—so I was able to pull the drives, plug them into a Pi through a SATA card, and recover the array pretty easily using mdadm.
The vendor NASes do seem to add extra partitions besides just one main 'md0', though—so you probably couldn't expect to yank the drives from a Synology and pop them into an ASUSTOR directly.
I also tested pulling drives configured in the Drivestor and putting them in the Lockerstor, and that worked, but there were quirks if I tried in the opposite direction.
In the end, I would rather make sure I have a complete/separate backup of the NAS before attempting to move the drives, just in case.
And I use pi's as interchangeable/swappable processors for a variety of different tasks. Its only casing which people tend to miss with pi's which can be addressed with 3d printing.
My Synology has been anything but realiable in the past month or so. I've twice had to hard reboot it because it stops working. I think it stops writing all data, which means that even something as simepl as "echo "" > out" will hang forever. Can't even turn it off because DSM stops responding and "sudo reboot" hangs.
I have no idea whether it's a disk going bad, the file system going bad or the entire device going bad. It did give a warning that an I/O command timed out on one of the disks, but I've yet to get a S.M.A.R.T. extended test completed on the disk.
Does it hang with ssh timing out? In that case, next time it hangs try opening it up and logging in via the UART interface available on most Synology NASes. Also it may give you extra info if the kernel panicks.
I agonized about this for years. I wanted a proper server, not something embedded or a Pi with a rat's nest of cables, that would still fit in a credenza in the living room.
Ended up getting an HP MicroServer Gen8 and absolutely love it. Same cube design as the DS918+, but with proper iLO (remote media, etc.), lots of boot options, and very stoutly built. It feels like a real HP DL300-series server (the Gen9 does not IMHO). I bought it as it was being discontinued.
It's running VMware ESXi with FreeNAS on top of that, with an LSI SAS card connected to the drive bays, then hardware-pass-through'ed to the FreeNAS VM. I've got the home's DNS server, Pi-hole, Unifi controller, test VMs, etc. happily virtualized alongside FreeNAS. 16GB RAM total, with 8GB dedicated to FreeNAS. Boot is off a microSD card (on the motherboard, naturally) and VM datastore is on an SSD connected where the optical drive would go.
I know I'm violating several recommendations here (low RAM, virtualized FreeNAS, SAS card passed through, etc. etc.) but it does indeed work, very well in fact. 2+ years of serving the home. With the Gen8, HP built almost the perfect home server for tech-oriented types... pity they cost-reduced its successor.
Yep, I did the same, though currently running on a much older version. Ubuntu, ZFS and a bunch of mirrored drives. The thing has been rock solid for years.
Raspberry is not really cheap anymore. The start package (rp4 4gb + charger + sd + ethernet/hdmi cables) is 100 euros in my country.
Meanwhile you can get a GK3V mini pc on Aliexpress with a j4125, 8gb LPDDR4 and 256GB SSD for 180 euros, which probably has 3x-4x the performance of the pi.
That's quite a markup you're experiencing. A conversion based on US prices makes it seem like you should be able to get that stuff for a little more than sixty Euros. If you can get it at all: availability is tough right now all over, I assume.
Is that price difference about shipping costs or VAT or what?
> GK3V mini pc
That is a very cool looking thing, but targeting a different use case, I would think.
Not everyone has to buy that separately. For example, I have plenty of sd cards laying around.
For the charger you are probably right due to the rpi not working with every usbc adapter, but that's 10 euros.
You selected the 4GB one, but if you select the 2GB or 1GB version things get cheaper too.
I think they are great value for a very reasonable price.
The kits are always going to be marked up—and even more so today, since it's so hard to find individual Pis in stock anywhere.
Here in the US, the only way for many people to get a Pi 4 is in a kit that's at least $100 (sometimes scalped and marked up to $150-200 on Amazon or eBay). Until about 3 months ago, though, I could reliably find a model I wanted from Micro Center or one of the official Pi online resellers for $35-75 (list price).
Any reason why this is the case? Chip shortages? Backing up of imports?
I just noticed this the other day when looking to get a Pi 4 as a gift for my brother. It's crazy to think just a year or two ago I bought two at normal price, and now one can't find any individual boards anywhere really
Mostly the chip shortages—Raspberry Pi has pulled out all the stops but couldn't come anywhere close to meeting demand over 2021. And they even decided to focus production only on the BCM2711-based devices for the latter part of this year.
I'd be interested if anyone can comment on commercial bulk procurement of Pis. Any idea what the volume discounts are? And also would be interesting to know what the supply has been like for the past year(s) for commercial customers.
I've heard anecdotally that most Pis sold are used in industry, so wouldn't be surprised if they're being prioritized.
I’ve found this to be the case for most of the time Raspberry Pis have been around. The cost proposition has always relied on using other components people have “lying around”, like the power adapter, SD card, etc. However as the power quality requirements have gone up for each Pi release, old AC adapters can’t be used anymore, SD cards need to be better quality to handle the writes, and you want a case for it, etc. From my perspective you’ve always been looking at close to $100 to get everything you need for it to be useful.
Compare this to another aarch64 system, honeycomb lx2
esxi for arm on the lx2 now supports pcie passthru of it's PCIe3.0 x8 slot. I successfully passed the nvme controller and a 25GbE port from a ConnectX-4 into an ubuntu 21.10 uefi aarch64 vm
Linux chad-SolidRun-CEX7-Platform 5.13.0-22-generic #22-Ubuntu SMP Fri Nov 5 13:22:27 UTC 2021 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux
I've been wanting to test out one of Solid Run's boards, but haven't had the opportunity. Have you done any benchmarking to see how much throughput you actually get? I would hope it's a lot more than the Pi, but can't know until it's thoroughly tested!
One thing to note: the Honeycomb LX2 is listed at $750 :)
Planning to benchmark it a bit later today, thanks for sharing your scripts I will start there and share with you via gh.
Also happy to report GPU + audio fully working on ubuntu 21.10 aarch64-uefi. GPU is nvidia gt710 in the pcie3x8 slot via nouveau drivers. May take a crack at some unigine benchmarks later :)
At $750 without memory, storage, or case and only offering a x8 PCIe 3.0 slot it seems to lose the advantage of being cheap while still being worse than a non-ARM64 box in terms of interfaces (and likely performance).
I bought a Synology not for the hardware, but the software. I went down the FreeNAS/TrueNAS rabbithole before. But it's a pain and the Synology software lets me get things setup easier.
It just depends on how much effort you want to put into it. I'm a software engineer, not an IT person. Most of the value I generate is related to writing software. So when we needed a shared NAS for the company I setup a FreeNAS server. Got a used ebay rack server and put it on there. Worked just ok, just had to keep tweaking stuff with it, the UI kind of sucked, used ebay servers are crap hardware and fail, etc.
Got a Synology had it up and running in an hour and I was pretty much done. Every 6 months I take a look at it or add a user if I need to. But it pretty much takes care of itself and I don't worry about it. It emails me every sunday with its status and I call it good. I can keep doing the actual productive parts of my job.
I am well aware about NUCs. I do not really want to talk here why I need Pi in particular. I am however amazed at how easily people here make whole bunch of assumptions that have nothing to do with the actual case.
I documented everything in excruciating detail in this GitHub issue [1] — but in summary it was RAID5 created by mdadm (to replicate what the Drivestor 4 Pro does via ADM—it doesn't have ZFS as an option), and bcache set up on top of that with an EXT4 filesystem.
Frankly I'm fed up with pi's: they're not reliable at all for 24/7 uses cases.
I have a PI 3 at work that needs frequent hard reboots because it fails to read the USB peripheral it's connected to.
I also have half dozen PI 4 connected to big screens, that randomly fail to show anything (black screen). They need several hard reboot to get back to work.
My boss wasn't convinced that it was the pis fault. To prove it, I just connected an old PC tower on one of the screen: this setup never caused any problem in months.
Are you using official cables too? Cause all my Pi instabilities have come from power supply issues, and in all cases the problem was actually due to crappy cables.
I bought a cheap USB cable tester[1] from AliExpress and ended up throwing away half my cables.
Well one would assume it's proper then. You could still do a load test with the USB tester I linked to, see if voltage drops too much under 2A load, but I'd assume that's not the issue.
I have a Pi 4 that's been rock stable, running both Hypriot w/ Docker containers, and recently, TalosOS w/ full k8s. Single-node k8s on a Pi is horrendously slow during changes, if you're wondering, but it's fast enough once everything is stable. I have it running JupyterLab right now. Don't really notice a difference in speed once the kernel launches for tinkering-level scripts.
I've been running a pi at home for more than a half a year now.
It's running multiple web services, like my personal blog https://habet.dev/blog nextcloud, wireguard, pihole and more.
You know, i think that ARM is really good for personal computing!
However, right now i'm planning on adding more HDDs to my current homelab, which is made of low power last gen x86 hardware, but even so just 2 boxes with 200 GEs inside currently pull around 100W in total from the wall (PSUs are probably not awfully efficient either, to be honest).
That said, having PCI lanes does keep me hopeful - while i have 4 SATA ports on the mobo, expansion cards could bring that number up pretty nicely. I reckon that i could have about 8 HDDs in each box on consumer hardware with few to no issues, while also using them as servers with ~32 GB of RAM for my container clusters.
If i had to start over, would i go for a Raspberry Pi or an equivalent cluster, or maybe a dedicated NAS? Maybe, as long as ARM software isn't too hard to come across, and the limited RAM or other expandability doesn't become too much of a problem.
I bought a Pi 4 with the intention of using it as a services box for a Synology NAS, but it turns out that hosting a Postgres cluster over the network isn't a good idea.
I've since moved the data onto an SSD directly connected to the Pi and use the NAS purely as a backup mechanism, which I guess was the point of having a NAS to begin with. I get the impression that trying to run things directly on the NAS is cumbersome with Synology's OS.
77 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadEDIT: Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596179
https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=produ...
https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=produ...
https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=produ...
It's not a hard requirement to use Synology drives, but on the newer/higher-end models the options to not use Synology drives are very limited. For example the FS2500 only has four models of SSD on the HCL and two are Synology.
IMHO, the price premium for the Synology branded drives is reasonable. Pay for the validated drives. Maintaining a broad HCL is no small task.
https://blog.synology.com/in-pursuit-of-reliability-hat5300-...
I happen to have Western Digital drives in my Synology DS920+.
I configured it about a year ago. Before I updated to what was then a beta version of DSM it refused to install all together, which was quite frustrating.
The list of supported drives according to Synology is depressingly short for this model - the only non-Synology or Toshiba drive is a single Western Digital.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=categ...
Synology supports a wide range of drives, including in mixed co figurations - size- and brand-wise.
When people go down the Synology path they are often running apps and doing more than providing a big pool of storage. I'm finding that my needs have changed towards my NAS being only a pool of storage on my local network. It is there as the first tier of backups to speed up disaster recovery. I feel confident that I could move to a more DIY NAS solution because it would only be used for NAS storage.
It's not ideal, but an old desktop is now much better for my app needs, including Plex. Ideally, I'd have a single app box with the power consumption of 4-5 Raspberry Pi. I have only found a couple of ARM server solutions which are fairly old and ARM doesn't have standard sockets etc. because the focus seems to be on SoC instead of replicating what I'm used to with PCs and ATX mobos.
Only the x86 models support running Linux containers, packaging an application for Synology didn't exactly seem easy to to and the UI is almost unusably sluggish and has super confusing UX (it emulates a desktop environment in the browser ... right, very cool).
Running an own standard Linux-based NAS is more effort, but not terribly so. The additional flexibility may be worth it: It makes it quite painless to integrate with other data sources and sinks for backups and stuff and can run a lot of personal services (home automation, budgeting tool, IRC bouncer ...).
They are dual-core, 512MB RAM, where the previous DS110j was single core, 128MB RAM and the DS115j was single core, 256MB RAM. The previous models just ran way too close to CPU starvation or swapping hell.
I have to say my Odroid only runs once a week - started remotely through IPSEC for offsite backups. So it is not a 24/7 setup.
The vendor NASes do seem to add extra partitions besides just one main 'md0', though—so you probably couldn't expect to yank the drives from a Synology and pop them into an ASUSTOR directly.
I also tested pulling drives configured in the Drivestor and putting them in the Lockerstor, and that worked, but there were quirks if I tried in the opposite direction.
In the end, I would rather make sure I have a complete/separate backup of the NAS before attempting to move the drives, just in case.
https://kb.synology.com/DSM/tutorial/How_can_I_recover_data_...
I have no idea whether it's a disk going bad, the file system going bad or the entire device going bad. It did give a warning that an I/O command timed out on one of the disks, but I've yet to get a S.M.A.R.T. extended test completed on the disk.
Ended up getting an HP MicroServer Gen8 and absolutely love it. Same cube design as the DS918+, but with proper iLO (remote media, etc.), lots of boot options, and very stoutly built. It feels like a real HP DL300-series server (the Gen9 does not IMHO). I bought it as it was being discontinued.
It's running VMware ESXi with FreeNAS on top of that, with an LSI SAS card connected to the drive bays, then hardware-pass-through'ed to the FreeNAS VM. I've got the home's DNS server, Pi-hole, Unifi controller, test VMs, etc. happily virtualized alongside FreeNAS. 16GB RAM total, with 8GB dedicated to FreeNAS. Boot is off a microSD card (on the motherboard, naturally) and VM datastore is on an SSD connected where the optical drive would go.
I know I'm violating several recommendations here (low RAM, virtualized FreeNAS, SAS card passed through, etc. etc.) but it does indeed work, very well in fact. 2+ years of serving the home. With the Gen8, HP built almost the perfect home server for tech-oriented types... pity they cost-reduced its successor.
Meanwhile you can get a GK3V mini pc on Aliexpress with a j4125, 8gb LPDDR4 and 256GB SSD for 180 euros, which probably has 3x-4x the performance of the pi.
Is that price difference about shipping costs or VAT or what?
> GK3V mini pc
That is a very cool looking thing, but targeting a different use case, I would think.
If you don't need all the parts, then you can shave some off.
https://www.kiwi-electronics.nl/nl/merk-raspberry-pi
You selected the 4GB one, but if you select the 2GB or 1GB version things get cheaper too. I think they are great value for a very reasonable price.
Here in the US, the only way for many people to get a Pi 4 is in a kit that's at least $100 (sometimes scalped and marked up to $150-200 on Amazon or eBay). Until about 3 months ago, though, I could reliably find a model I wanted from Micro Center or one of the official Pi online resellers for $35-75 (list price).
I just noticed this the other day when looking to get a Pi 4 as a gift for my brother. It's crazy to think just a year or two ago I bought two at normal price, and now one can't find any individual boards anywhere really
They posted a blog post with some detail behind what's going on: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-shortages-and-...
I've heard anecdotally that most Pis sold are used in industry, so wouldn't be surprised if they're being prioritized.
esxi for arm on the lx2 now supports pcie passthru of it's PCIe3.0 x8 slot. I successfully passed the nvme controller and a 25GbE port from a ConnectX-4 into an ubuntu 21.10 uefi aarch64 vm
Linux chad-SolidRun-CEX7-Platform 5.13.0-22-generic #22-Ubuntu SMP Fri Nov 5 13:22:27 UTC 2021 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux
02:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller SM981/PM981/PM983 (prog-if 02 [NVM Express]) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller SM981/PM981/PM983
0a:00.0 Ethernet controller: Mellanox Technologies MT27710 Family [ConnectX-4 Lx] Subsystem: Mellanox Technologies Stand-up ConnectX-4 Lx EN, 25GbE dual-port SFP28, PCIe3.0 x8, MCX4121A-ACAT
One thing to note: the Honeycomb LX2 is listed at $750 :)
Also happy to report GPU + audio fully working on ubuntu 21.10 aarch64-uefi. GPU is nvidia gt710 in the pcie3x8 slot via nouveau drivers. May take a crack at some unigine benchmarks later :)
Are you suggesting that that’s a fool’s errand and I shouldn’t do that?
Got a Synology had it up and running in an hour and I was pretty much done. Every 6 months I take a look at it or add a user if I need to. But it pretty much takes care of itself and I don't worry about it. It emails me every sunday with its status and I call it good. I can keep doing the actual productive parts of my job.
I am actually interested in hearing downsides if bcache used in front of ZFS besides obvious data implications (single copy v.s. multiple).
[1] https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss...
I have a PI 3 at work that needs frequent hard reboots because it fails to read the USB peripheral it's connected to.
I also have half dozen PI 4 connected to big screens, that randomly fail to show anything (black screen). They need several hard reboot to get back to work.
My boss wasn't convinced that it was the pis fault. To prove it, I just connected an old PC tower on one of the screen: this setup never caused any problem in months.
I bought a cheap USB cable tester[1] from AliExpress and ended up throwing away half my cables.
[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32973869742.html (random store, feel free to find another)
Looks like that : https://www.okdo.com/us/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2019/06/E...
Mine is powered via PoE FWIW.
Lately I started writing blog posts detailing the set up: https://habet.dev/self-hosting-and-securing-web-services-out...
I haven't had any issues with it!
But OP is talking about adding peripherals.
Don’t get me started on trying to switch to SSDs because you kept killing your SD cards.
However, right now i'm planning on adding more HDDs to my current homelab, which is made of low power last gen x86 hardware, but even so just 2 boxes with 200 GEs inside currently pull around 100W in total from the wall (PSUs are probably not awfully efficient either, to be honest).
That said, having PCI lanes does keep me hopeful - while i have 4 SATA ports on the mobo, expansion cards could bring that number up pretty nicely. I reckon that i could have about 8 HDDs in each box on consumer hardware with few to no issues, while also using them as servers with ~32 GB of RAM for my container clusters.
If i had to start over, would i go for a Raspberry Pi or an equivalent cluster, or maybe a dedicated NAS? Maybe, as long as ARM software isn't too hard to come across, and the limited RAM or other expandability doesn't become too much of a problem.
I've since moved the data onto an SSD directly connected to the Pi and use the NAS purely as a backup mechanism, which I guess was the point of having a NAS to begin with. I get the impression that trying to run things directly on the NAS is cumbersome with Synology's OS.