I’m scared about these Raspis laying around so naked. There are cases for them, man… I only see fire hazards. I had an exposed mining rig laying on the floor in my bedroom, that ran only 2 HDDs when I started with storj, and get rid of videocards. One day it just stoped working… I don’t know what fried the mobo; the dust, the antidust sprays from someone who cleaned the desk next to it… A drop of a beverage maybe. But after that, when I see exposed circuits, it gets my stress levels high.
2 Likes
Really low power devices, low heat output. I doubt they’d be able to ignite anything…
But a case does make it look tidier 
limit circuit board exposure, doesn’t take much to cause issues with complex electronics.
had so much stuff die due to me doing this in the past.
1 Like
It’s always better to put it in the case. And with fan, if possible. The dust filters will not be excess there too.
+1 here. They are ESD sensitive, with all those pins exposed, and the recent ones are quite powerful when unencumbered by thermal throttling. Fun fact, older ones were also photo sensitive – you could reboot them by taking a picture 
There are fanless metal enclosures that make contact with CPU/RAM/other hot controllers, such as the whole box acts like a thermal mass + heatsink.
I’m using this one from amazon:
Under full throttle load the temperature is never reported above 55C, and no thermal throttling.
3 Likes
That’s really interesting
Unfortunately mine are powered by PoE and I have not yet found a similar case that I can use with the PoE HAT
I have RPI3B+, so mine is different:
With their extension to support HDD:
1 Like
There are people willing to print custom cases, for a small amount of money.
I wonder if there was any atempt to put on the market a Storj box, like the ones for Chia.
I’m tinking a case with 2-4 HDDs, and a raspi 4 8GB, or custom NASes based on miniPC components, with a custom GUI and all the scripts necesary to automate the install and run the nodes? Maybe even an app for managing and modifing the nodes, headless.
1 Like
I’d thought of that before, although I’d prefer something based on a NUC as I’m not entirely convinced of the performance or reliability of SATA-over-USB solutions like the ones used on Raspberry Pis…
A dedicated team and a Kickstarter campaign is all it needes. I realy believe people will buy them, regardless of how ROI looks like. I watch Vosk with all his chia boxes, and the ROI is like 2-3 years, and they sell very well.
Kinda goes against Storj’s “use whatever you’ve already got spinning” philosophy.
Also, RoI calculations would have to be done on so many assumptions of unpredictable factors as to be nearly meaningless.
I’m not sure it would sell all that well, sadly.
3 Likes
+1. These usb-sata bridges should be avoided like plaque.
There are however raspberry-pi type single board computers with proper sata. Odroid HC4 is one example: built on a decent sata controller JMB582, (albeit with crappy Realtek ethernet controller) that provides two sata ports, and 8GB of ram, perfect for storj usecase: HDD for data and SSD for metadata/caches/etc.
That’s not enough to bother, unless you are deploying that on massive scale, which is not feasible for other reasons…
This one. If it was profitable – storj would not need us and could host stuff themselves. But even Backblaze BTW is still not profitable. Storj can only exist as conceived – converting existing wasted capacity to $$$.
I would happily build one for shits and giggles and for the sake of challenge of tuning this into a fast solution, and to see how much performance can be squeezed from it – but I would not even think of trying to make any money on that.
BTW there are other single board computers - -like zima, that provide PCIE port, so you could technically plug in the whole HBA card and build a very low power multi-disk nas. My conventional x64 server motherboard and CPU consumes 40W no matter what, while CPU utilization is under 1% on average. I’d love to reduce that to 5W.
The Ryzen R1600 that powers the DS723+ is very tunable and very powerful for the scope of NAS machines, but I think you can’t buy it anywere, only if you are a system integrator and buy directly from AMD. Also it supports ECC mem.
Outgrew my old RS819, now using slightly bigger Synology units.
Currently running 14 nodes, with about 40TB stored total.
7 Likes
Is this Synology unit on the top bend?
1 Like
I think is just the optical lens aberation.
I do like those Dream Machine Pros
Is that an original one or an SE? 
You guys are hilarious. Or I’m missing some inside joke.
Yes, the box says “Synology RS819”. It’s one of better synology ARM based low TDP units, in terms of build quality, and bang for buck.
It says “UDM Pro” under the display. Hence, original. The SE would be “UDM Pro SE”…
And I’d venture to guess that the white rectangle is Philips Hue, right next to the PoE splitter…
I was thinking he reffers to this, that looks bend.
Not methaforicaly.
2 Likes