I am considering a setup with Rock Pi 4 Model A 4 GB + Penta SATA HAT + 16 GB eMMC and fit this in an old ATX tower case. This way I can reuse the tower case and the ATX PSU to run up to five 3.5" HDDs as storage nodes.
I really like that the SATA HAT can be powered with ATX power.
I also like having a bootable eMMC slot.
Does anyone has an opinion on eMMC durability and performance? Is it more durable than SD cards? Is it a good idea to put the sqlite databases on the eMMC instead of on the HDDs?
eMMC is basically still a memory card except with a controller embedded. I don’t think you can expect it to be anywhere close to the durability of an SSD. But given that these chips are frequently used as main storage for cheaper tablets and smart phones, I think they’ll do at least a bit better than SD. Whether putting the databases on there is a good idea… I’m not sure. Since those are constantly being written to, it’s probably a higher level of load most tablets/smartphones usually deal with. But it doesn’t wrote large amounts of data and wear levelling would likely prevent early wear out.
Not all flash is equal though. Do you know if this would be using TLC or MLC? I doubt it’s SLC, that would be the most reliable, but MLC is probably pretty decent too. TLC would wear a lot faster though.
isn’t it better to get some mini atx mobo instead… i mean one of the big limitation of the PI type computers is that they are made that small… ram is much cheaper if its bigger modules and more standart and like wise with many other things… reusing the cabinet and atx case i think is a great idea… you might also be able to use front bays for 3.5" drive or simply buy some plastic converters frame type deal to make use of the tower 5½" bays for 3.5" drives…
but with a real mobo you get an onboard sata controller and you can split that out with a sata splitter into basically as many as you like… i mean you can do like 4 drives on each sata cable without to much hassle if need be… so with the right mobo you could have 6 or 8 sata ports today… and either of them can be split into 4 sata ports easy… then you can just use a regular ssd instead of a crappy sd card for boot, and you can upgrade ram and cpu if you should ever decide to…
the PI type computers are great for small project, but if you expand them to much i don’t think it’s really a great of good value setup…
something like an atx psu might also have a minimum power usage when running… so you might not even get the advantage of low overhead on electrical usage from the PI type deal
Never heard of foresee. Can’t find many details on this specific chip either. I’d much rather see a name like micron, Samsung or skhynix on such chips. But then I guess the price would probably be different too. Either way, I would guess with what little information they list on their website, it’s probably not the highest quality NAND. I think if you have a decent non-SMR HDD you’d be better off keeping the db’s on the HDD and not risking it wearing out.
i’ve bought my fair share of stuff from china… expect poor quality if you aren’t 100% sure you are getting what you order…
sure one can get some good deals… but … well made in china should almost be a warning label
they want your money and to copy tech…
i don’t mind ordering stuff from china, but i’m very selective and try to stay far away from their knockoff brands…
foresee… sounds ominous doesn’t it… or can’t you foresee that…
but yeah don’t mind me i just hate all the Chinese knockoff stuff, it has ruined my day one to many times… it’s is cheap tho… but so is high quality used hardware…
I guess you could look at some of the boards with CPUs embedded. But you’re going to be buying separate memory and you probably won’t find anything with 8 sata ports. You could use PCIe cards for that though.
Won’t be as cheap as a rock pi, but you’d be a lot more versatile.
i was thinking of using a ITX mini mobo, but then i realized i’m not sure thats compatible with the ATX PSU, but looking at ATX mini mobo’s they will end up using like 80-100 watts so something like 10 times the power of the RPI… but then you won’t run into limitations… you could get a 1151 LGA or AM4 socket mobo… and simply add the chip you like the power usage off or processing power you need, also you select the ram and ofc get atleast 4 sata ports…
embedded or arm is ofc better, arm is especially good for power saving… and ofc 100watts is peak power usage from the mini atx
i checked around a bit ryzen 2200G has internal graphics i believe, then you just find a micro atx mobo you like to go with it, ofc that is vastly over kill for a storagenode server…
ofc this is basically state of the art, but still only 125watt peak draw and if you go older stuff you can get it much lower … like 65watts…
ofc to save power you want the gpu in the cpu so anything older or smaller than this ryzen will either need to be intel i series or have onboard graphic of some other sort
but it’s a real computer, not some gimped DIY computer made for hobby projects…
it will run a trancoding plex server, and whatever else vm’s you want to force upon it… it could run zfs and have like 64gb ram easy… its a real computer… much like many of the older options, this is just the cheapest, newest die on the block, with internal gpu
i see many usages for RPI’s but they are also severely limited in features, and all the stuff you add also draws power… only reason it’s so low power is because it doesn’t have any features…
SoC is great an all that, amazing stuff of that out there… but it comes at a cost when everything is on die, because it’s one size fits and and you are stuck with what you buy and anything you want to send into or out of the system needs to be amped up or down which requires power…
i mean how much power does the SATA hat pull alone… most likely close to what the RPI will pull on its own… if desktop computer could have the features for less power then they would… they don’t because lower power costs in other ways…
ofc as a rule of thumb, the small and simpler it can get the less power it will use…
the size of a system literally consumes power or is limited by how much cooling it can do…
oh sorry seemed to get the 2200G and 3200G confused… obviously the 3200G is the new die… but i believe 2200g might be the earliest ryzen with internal gpu…
and as shown in the video… it can actually do fairly intensive workloads… if you want that option for not much extra cost…
I looked around and found that ASRock has SOC motherboards with Intel J-series CPU, which has TDP of only 10W. This is an interesting board for around $100: https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/J4105-ITX/
There are even cheaper ones, but with fewer CPU cores and SATA ports.
Alternatively, I looked at Athlon GE200. It has TDP 35W, but twice the CPU power compared to the J4105. Together with a motherboard, it goes around $100 too.
If I can really fit 8-10 HDDs in the ATX tower case and connect them to the Athlon 200GE build, it would really make this setup optimal and justify the 35 W TDP.
What’s the best way to install a SATA Port Multiplier? With a PCI-Express card, or with a card that connects to one of the onboard SATA ports?
I like those boards. They’re great for custom NAS builds as well.
I’d go for a PCIe card. Not all sata controllers support port multipliers in the first place and you’d be sharing bandwidth on the sata ports as well. You can get decent PCIe cards with more sata ports for pretty much the same price. So unless you’re planning to use that PCIe slot for anything else, I’d go with the PCIe card variant.
Yes, but the ASRock board you linked seems to only have a small M.2 for a wifi card. I don’t think you can use that one for storage.
Since the SSD you mention uses SATA over M.2 anyway, you could also just buy a 2.5" sata ssd and use one of the sata ports. Or find a different board like the ASUS you linked that does have an M.2 slot.
I am actually considering the ASUS Prime A320M-K board with AMD Athlon 200GE. I’d add the 120GB SDD on the M.2 port to keep the 4 onboard SATA ports free for HDDs.
Later I would expand with a 4-port or 6-port PCIe x4 SATA multiplier.
With the ASRock board, it seems I’d be limited to 3 or 4 HDDs for efficient use.
Yeah, sounds like a good plan. Power usage is still within acceptable levels I would say.
Your efforts make me really want to build a multinode setup in a U-NAS NSC-810 case. It’s unfortunate that they are so pricey. But the hardware you are looking at + such a case would make an amazing relatively affordable and super expandable node setup. Though you would have to opt for a mini-ITX board with that case. If Storj ever starts using more storage space than I can fit in my current hardware I may consider creating something like that.
stuff like these are pretty nice… not sure which ones are the best, never actually used them myself… also one could simply get a pci sata controller instead… if the mobo has the slot open… but imo this would work fine… i mean most mobo today will at the very least have 6Gbit/s sata ports… i forget if those are shared amongst two ports, per controller chip / lane or whatever…
but even if it was thats 300MBytes/s about for each lane… one of those is then split into 5 … so each port will be maxed at 60MBytes/s if all the drives are in use at the same time and if the bandwidth is split between to ports on one lane… which if memory serves is why sata ports usually comes in pairs… they share a lane…
so no point in making one… anyways long story short… 60mb/s is ample for most applications… and ofc one can just rearrange the drives so one uses as many lanes as possible… only have to use the multipliers before one is forced to… and a sata pci / pcie card will do a full 6Gbit or even 12Gbit if the drives will support it… depending on what one buys and if the pcie lanes can take it on the mobo…
which again will most likely come down to the chip…
but yeah lots of interesting stuff and options out there… one just have to do the research and don’t buy to cheap… because those who buy cheap, buy twice…
but yeah a 100$-150$ mini comp … sounds like a fun build… and SATA rules… you can do tons and tons of drives… only really the bandwidth and the capacity runs out at some point… like when you get into the PB range or close… then an older sata controller will not be able to manage it, because it cannot keep track of all the space… but you could split 1 sata controller out into like 150 hdd’s if one wanted… of you would end up having so many wires its ridiculous and the bandwidth for each drive would like wise be near non existing… like if we say 120 drives on a 12Gbit sata… thats 100mbit for each … so 12mbytes/s or so…
but most likely the cable management would end up being such a mess that it would fail in one end when one connects in the other… but atleast the technology can do that…
so go crazy, see what works and what doesn’t… so long as you can add maybe ram, pci / pcie and has sata ports… then it can’t really go to wrong… and really you will want some processing power if you want to run many nodes… on one system… but thats again where the power savings comes in…
a tiny cheap system with good processing and expansion… well then you are not stuck when you connected 3 drives… but you go to 20 if you wanted… and might just throw a eSATA controller card in the system and connect dumb external hdd mounts / racks… @kevink bought a eSATA disk box for like 100$, brand new… with 4 hotswap bays
ofc no real meaningful electronics in the box… but with a proper computer one already has that and thus can save on the expansion
good luck with the project.
and do let us hear how it turns out… always fun to see the frankenbuilds people can come up with…
maybe i should try and expand my own server like this… before i get a disk shelf… i got like 6 sata ports on the mobo… and they are kinda amazing… i duno how they can be 10 years old and support like 20TB hdd’s
