New Storagenode build - Intel N100?

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Awesome-Alexey at work!

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On iOs that text is incomplete: …“use the ?!? rather then ?!? option…”

What do you think about this adapter? Would it work on N100M mobo?
https://www.axagon.eu/en/produkty/pces-sa6

Yes. It’s a jelly bean sata controller: https://www.asmedia.com.tw/product/45aYq54sP8Qh7WH8/58dYQ8bxZ4UR9wG5

You can probably find much cheaper boards on the same chipset. Or, again, buy old LSI controller with miniSAS ports. Cheaper, better, more flexible.

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If the adapter gives you six ports, and the motherboard comes with two: there are many nice baby-NAS cases built for eight drives: have you considered something like the Jonsbro N3?

Didn’t knew about NAS cases… nice find! I already ordered the Asus Prime case and it’s already fited with mobo, PSU and a nice Noctua fan… because I like brown fans :blush:, even though I can’t see it’s use in this case model. I will see if it makes any difference with or without it.
The case it’s big, much bigger than a NAS, but it’s the best option for a fanless build.

My best find for the case is Fractal Node 804. 12 3.5 HDDs, good cooling. I am using the Axagon SATA expansion card for a while and it is running fine. Sata connector feels cheap tho.

It’s not only on iOS :slight_smile:
Thanks

By the way, you can do it yourself :wink:

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And i got 10x SATA from Delock also on Assmedia 1066 (or 1065 whatever it is) :
https://www.delock.de/produkt/89384/merkmale.html?setLanguage=en

and it works BUT,
nothing better from a professional controller like LSI 9200 series, or 9300.
Just like arrogantrabbit said, in this case listen.

When filewalker hit your HDD, You need all the performance possible from a controller.
The chips itself is for children plays, and not a constant I/O of many disks…
EVEN if the chip is somehow enough, the PCI lane of x2 (or even x4) for 6HDDs, or 10 HDDs is simply not optimal. How ever i do have some chinese BS x1 PCI extender, but for 1 HDD only, but what u can do if not enough SATA’s in motherboard and You r storj maniac…

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I am running Storj, Nextcloud, Duplicati and a Tezos bakery on one N100 all in Docker with 32 GB ram with Ubuntu Server. I runs perfect. The CPu becomes not hot. Especially the Tezos bakery needs power.

So the N100 is a awesome low power Home Server

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To be honest asmedia ASM1166 based AXAGON PCES-SA6 PCIe 6x SATA 6G looks absolutely gorgeous but weren’t you talking that you don’t want to run more then 4 drives on your machine? :- )

The advantage of AXAGON VS LSI would be probably significantly lower power consumption. I would expect something like 1 or 2 Watts for AXAGON vs 10 to 30 for LSI (LSI Host Bus Adapter (HBA) Power Consumption Comparison - ServeTheHome). You can run AXAGON without a fan, on LSI you may need to blow some air. But to be honest, I do know very little about LSI controllers, I cant quite distinguish major differences between “i8” and “i16” or in general between other types and it seems that there are tones of them. Not to mention its relation to your particular build.

My main concern currently is 1 PCIe 3.0 x4 (x2 mode) of N100DC-ITX mobo that is chosen by you. I do not quite understand how it works in relation to Storj. If I remember correctly, PCI interface has a direct access to CPU but 2 PCI mobo lanes would imply that at the same time only two operations can be serviced concurrently and you are currently talking about 8 HDD drives. CPU PassMark and 2Gb PCIe bandwidth might not be relevant at all in this case - on the other side of the CPU there is no GPU card - we do have slow HDDs.

So even if most of the files we are dealing with are small and there is a chance that they may be kept in N100 6 MB Smart Cache of 4 cores operating at 3.40 GHz aren’t those 2 lanes a bottleneck? I don’t know how storagenode is doing its scheduling but aren’t (currently recommended by @Toyoo and mentioned by you in your first post) ext4 and storagenode operations atomic? (disclaimer, I am not an expert on those topics - just thinking loud.)

What is that you don’t like about it if I may ask and what would you go for if you had a choice?

That Axagon (they have 3 models) along with Delock ones are the only ones I can find (excluding Amazon and ebay). I won’t fill it with drives, but I want something reliable.

Ok, now, I understand. (You were linking to 6 x SATA and the guys were talking 8 and 12 drives enclosures so my understanding was that you are going for additional drives).

I’ll see what future brings, but I don’t want to gatter to many drives in one spot. I have 7 locations were to spread them. It’s good to have options to expand though. If I have like 3-4 drives filled up, I can stop the FW, and focus in mantaining 1-2 new drives. The activity on filled drives are pretty low, except the FW. I don’t worrie to much about pcie bottlenecks; we have collegues that run many drives on USB ports and they run fine.
How did we choose the same icon? I get confused between our posts. :sweat_smile:

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Note that the H310 should be flashed to put it into true hba mode. I have one of these on the way at the moment to use in my TrueNAS server

https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc.html

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Yes sir, i bough a flashed one. So it can unRAID. So far im happy. It cost me ~$38.

so i can run 8 HDDs on it.
“i16” are just double chiped cards, so it can run 16 HDDs.
Also consumes double electricity.
Also 9300 series are running very hot, i8 or i16 especially.
So a dedicated fan is a must.

i actually have h310 its run hot, but its so old, back then they made unmeltable chips.

But i gave it bigger radiator anyway just for fun and overkill.
Along with fresh thermal paste, gelid extreme, try to get hot now!
Old paste was so dry, had to put new in accordance to the art.

Required some cyber blacksmithing skills but hey, it works, didn’t damaged anything thankfully.

@snorkel USB’s, epecialy in servermotherboards are very reiable, i know a guy who runed many HDDs for sia just on usb, but it was under linux, and server motherboard as well.

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Man, thats the Elder Scrolls style Skyrym blacksmithing! :slight_smile: In general, I dont have anything against USB but SATA / SAS is probably better. As for Chia on USB, to be honest, I dont know, I have never done any Chia plotting, however, one should probably not compare Chia to Storj, in terms of file sizes isnt it a different dimension? And thats probably not the only one of many dimensions it differs significantly.

I dont know, maybe because of the shortest path on negative graph directed acyclic graphs based filesystems. :slight_smile: