Not sure why this doesn’t exist. I don’t need 12TB of storage. When I had a Google account I never even crossed 15GB. 1TB should be plenty for myself and my family. I want to use NVMe since it is quieter and smaller. 2230 drives would be ideal. But I want 1 boot drive and 2 x storage drives in RAID. I guess I could potentially just have 2xNVMe and have the boot partition in RAID also? Bonus points if I can use it as a wireless router also.

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      71·
      6 months ago

      I work with real servers. SD card boot media is generally a bad idea. VMware officially semi-deprecated it a while back. Unless you tune your install to redirect typical I/O to the durable drives (which is going to be a pain, having to find and reconfigure all those services), typical logging to disk and various temp files are going to wear it out pretty quickly.

      I would just use two drives and not separate the OS. That way, you also don’t have to worry about the OS drive failing and taking down the server.

      Just be careful if you reinstall. I’d suggest deleting the OS partitions first, then reinstalling to the empty space, instead of trusting the installer to do it properly.

    • helenslunch@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      I appreciate the suggestion but these are not N100 PCs. I’m looking for something in the $200-300 range. Those are just complete overkill for my purposes.

      I do like the idea of using USB drives for storage, though…

      • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
        72·
        6 months ago

        I do like the idea of using USB drives for storage, though…

        I wholeheartedly don’t.

            • Sethayy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              2·
              6 months ago

              Though it could be cheaper to have a backup or 2, all identical bits stored on them and swap them out as(/if) they fail

            • ITGuyLevi@programming.devEnglish
              1·
              6 months ago

              I have a few servers that have been booting from USB for years. Two of my old freenas boxes (now just hosting backups of data from unraid), have been booting off the same USB sticks for almost 10 years now. In addition to the freenas boxes I use internal USB drives on Unraid, ProxMox, and ESXi hosts (had to try them all).

              Its a risk, but having a cloned USB as a backup can mitigate it a bit.

              • realbadat@programming.devEnglish
                1·
                6 months ago

                So just… Waiting for failure then? ;)

                As for me, give me an HA cluster and I don’t care if I need to reinstall. I don’t need to worry about an additional point of failure (USB drive) that is almost always going to fail before any of the other hardware.

                It’s part of why absolutely nothing important ever runs on a raspberry Pi for me though, SD cards are no better.

                Now as for my favorite example of why I don’t do it in production? Someone doing a bit of minor maintenance in the rack, accidentally pressed against a box running esxi off USB (on a gen 6 HP for rough timeline), broke the drive.

                The backup? Well, it had corrupted, and wouldn’t boot.

                • ITGuyLevi@programming.devEnglish
                  2·
                  6 months ago

                  Oh man, that would suck. I do not ever use an external USB port for that exact reason! Aside from a few desktops and laptops around the house all my equipment has an internal USB port for the purpose of a boot drive (I always assumed that was the reason).

                  All production stuff needs backups. Personally I try to keep boot device backups saved to another device as an image so if one goes down, I can clone it to a USB real quick and restore the blink to the lights; ideally I should also keep them off site, but I don’t like to use cloud providers (tin foil hat and all).

        • LifeBandit666@feddit.ukEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          I’m currently running 3.5 inch HDDs via usb3.0 to sata. Working ok so far (time will tell) but I do need a plug socket for every one of them

        • helenslunch@feddit.nlOPEnglish
          11·
          6 months ago

          You can get those machines second hand for the price range you specified.

          Maybe but they also presumably consume much more power?

            • 486@kbin.social
              2·
              6 months ago

              Before anyone loses their minds, imagine you get the i3-8300T model that will peak at 25W, that’s about 0.375$ a month to run the thing assuming a constant 100% load that you’ll never have.

              Not sure how you came to that conclusion, but even in places with very cheap electricity, it does not even come close to your claimed $0.375 per month. At 25 W you would obviously consume about 18 kWh per month. Assuming $0.10/kWh you’d pay $1.80/month. In Europe you can easily pay $0.30/kWh, so you would already pay more than $5 per month or $60 per year.

                • 486@kbin.social
                  2·
                  6 months ago

                  Well, what they are stating is obviously wrong then. No need to use some website for that anyway, since it is so easy to calculate yourself.

                • rambos@lemm.eeEnglish
                  2·
                  6 months ago

                  While I agree 25W is not much, I pay around 1€ for 1W a year (Croatia) and I know there are countries that pay way more thn that. Still, we are talking about power that is close to SBC consumption, you cant go much lower. I think number of devices (drives etc) are more important than actual CPU idle power

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.itEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    I don’t think that you can have 3 pcie lanes on a N100 CPU

    but you can have 2 sata in raid 1 as boot drive for truenas and 2 nvme in zfs raid 1

      • retro@infosec.pubEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        NVMe isn’t the compactness. That’s just the interface that is used. The form factor is M.2. You can get SATA drives in the M.2 form factor as well. So if you do want an small form factor drive, make sure you look at if it is SATA or NVMe and which one your device supports as they are keyed differently.

    • helenslunch@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Haha. Yeah I did see that. It’s an interesting product but ARM-based. Meaning it would be excellent for a NAS but not so good for a home server.

  • thayer@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    I think you’ll be out of luck for 3 slots, but you could always use the native slot for OS and dock the other 2 via USB with RAID capability in something like this.

    • helenslunch@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Yeah I’ve seen these DAS boxes before but from what I’ve read there are lots of speed and compatibility issues…

  • Shimitar@feddit.itEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    Using USB3 / USBC external storage for years.

    Buy a good, non cheap, USB jbod or raid enclosure and put SSDs in it!

    I have a 4 bay USB3 jbod plus a 2 bay USB-C box, inside the disks are all RAID.

    Indeed internal disks / ssds / nvme are better, but consider that speed wise even USB3 is faster than any WiFi.

    Just don’t but they cheap and use good cables. And if you use spinning disks, ensure they stay cool.

  • adONis@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    6 months ago

    Any specific reason why you’d want to go with NVMEs for your storage, and not just 2.5 SSDs?

    If it’s performance you’re concerned about. I have 3 SSDs in RAID (external USB 3.2 JBOD enclosure), and they perform way better than a single NVME.

    For minipcs, have a look at aliexpress. They tend to have the branded options much cheaper than amazon. Trigkey, minisforum, Beelink, etc.

    • helenslunch@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

      Mostly size. SATA SSD would be acceptable also but I don’t see many N100 PCs with SATA.

      External DAS seems to cause a lot of problems from my research.

      • adONis@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        I’m running mine successfully for the past few months and never had an issue. The only thing to make sure, is, that it passes the serial number through. In case it goes bonkers, you can just swap it.

      • adONis@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        6 months ago

        I run a trigkey (AMD 5700u) as my NAS (unraid) and homelab, and a CW p-5 (N305) as my router (opnsense), and have no problems at all. So they for sure boot Linux and FreeBSD, which is 90% the case.

        Unlike some old second hand, new hardware is more powerful and energy efficient.

          • adONis@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            6 months ago

            name a feature…

            No need to, they both have their place for sure… I don’t know their features, and I probably don’t even use most of them. but openwrt is solid enough for potato hardware, whereas opnsense is not. Also, my point was to show that both operating systems run on the aliexpress hardware, counteracting your claim that some systems don’t boot.

          • Nyfure@kbin.social
            1·
            6 months ago

            Please include the actual calculations for energy-prices as many, you may not know, live in different locations and pay different prices compared to you.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    11·
    6 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
    HA Home Assistant automation software
    ~ High Availability
    LTT Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
    RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
    SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
    SBC Single-Board Computer
    SSD Solid State Drive mass storage

    [Thread #629 for this sub, first seen 26th Mar 2024, 17:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]