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 donāt 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 theyāll do at least a bit better than SD. Whether putting the databases on there is a good ideaā¦ Iām not sure. Since those are constantly being written to, itās probably a higher level of load most tablets/smartphones usually deal with. But it doesnāt 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 itās SLC, that would be the most reliable, but MLC is probably pretty decent too. TLC would wear a lot faster though.
isnāt it better to get some mini atx mobo insteadā¦ i mean one of the big limitation of the PI type computers is that they are made that smallā¦ ram is much cheaper if its bigger modules and more standart and like wise with many other thingsā¦ reusing the cabinet and atx case i think is a great ideaā¦ 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 5Ā½" bays for 3.5" drivesā¦
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 likeā¦ i mean you can do like 4 drives on each sata cable without to much hassle if need beā¦ so with the right mobo you could have 6 or 8 sata ports todayā¦ and either of them can be split into 4 sata ports easyā¦ 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 toā¦
the PI type computers are great for small project, but if you expand them to much i donāt think itās really a great of good value setupā¦
something like an atx psu might also have a minimum power usage when runningā¦ so you might not even get the advantage of low overhead on electrical usage from the PI type deal
Never heard of foresee. Canāt find many details on this specific chip either. Iād 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, itās probably not the highest quality NAND. I think if you have a decent non-SMR HDD youād be better off keeping the dbās on the HDD and not risking it wearing out.
iāve bought my fair share of stuff from chinaā¦ expect poor quality if you arenāt 100% sure you are getting what you orderā¦
sure one can get some good dealsā¦ but ā¦ well made in china should almost be a warning label
they want your money and to copy techā¦
i donāt mind ordering stuff from china, but iām very selective and try to stay far away from their knockoff brandsā¦
foreseeā¦ sounds ominous doesnāt itā¦ or canāt you foresee thatā¦
but yeah donāt mind me i just hate all the Chinese knockoff stuff, it has ruined my day one to many timesā¦ itās is cheap thoā¦ but so is high quality used hardwareā¦
I guess you could look at some of the boards with CPUs embedded. But youāre going to be buying separate memory and you probably wonāt find anything with 8 sata ports. You could use PCIe cards for that though.
Wonāt be as cheap as a rock pi, but youād be a lot more versatile.
i was thinking of using a ITX mini mobo, but then i realized iām not sure thats compatible with the ATX PSU, but looking at ATX mini moboās they will end up using like 80-100 watts so something like 10 times the power of the RPIā¦ but then you wonāt run into limitationsā¦ you could get a 1151 LGA or AM4 socket moboā¦ 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 portsā¦
embedded or arm is ofc better, arm is especially good for power savingā¦ 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 serverā¦
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 ā¦ like 65wattsā¦
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 itās a real computer, not some gimped DIY computer made for hobby projectsā¦
it will run a trancoding plex server, and whatever else vmās you want to force upon itā¦ it could run zfs and have like 64gb ram easyā¦ its a real computerā¦ 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 RPIās but they are also severely limited in features, and all the stuff you add also draws powerā¦ only reason itās so low power is because it doesnāt have any featuresā¦
SoC is great an all that, amazing stuff of that out thereā¦ but it comes at a cost when everything is on die, because itās 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 powerā¦
i mean how much power does the SATA hat pull aloneā¦ most likely close to what the RPI will pull on its ownā¦ if desktop computer could have the features for less power then they wouldā¦ they donāt because lower power costs in other waysā¦
ofc as a rule of thumb, the small and simpler it can get the less power it will useā¦
the size of a system literally consumes power or is limited by how much cooling it can doā¦
oh sorry seemed to get the 2200G and 3200G confusedā¦ obviously the 3200G is the new dieā¦ but i believe 2200g might be the earliest ryzen with internal gpuā¦
and as shown in the videoā¦ it can actually do fairly intensive workloadsā¦ if you want that option for not much extra costā¦
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.
Whatās 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. Theyāre great for custom NAS builds as well.
Iād go for a PCIe card. Not all sata controllers support port multipliers in the first place and youād 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 youāre planning to use that PCIe slot for anything else, Iād 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 donāt 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. Iād 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 Iād 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. Itās 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.
this one isnāt too bad but itās 500 bucks without RAMā¦
It does have 16 SATA ports though so 16x16=256TB of theoretical capacity with 16TB hard drives.
stuff like these are pretty niceā¦ not sure which ones are the best, never actually used them myselfā¦ also one could simply get a pci sata controller insteadā¦ if the mobo has the slot openā¦ but imo this would work fineā¦ i mean most mobo today will at the very least have 6Gbit/s sata portsā¦ i forget if those are shared amongst two ports, per controller chip / lane or whateverā¦
but even if it was thats 300MBytes/s about for each laneā¦ one of those is then split into 5 ā¦ 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 laneā¦ which if memory serves is why sata ports usually comes in pairsā¦ they share a laneā¦
so no point in making oneā¦ anyways long story shortā¦ 60mb/s is ample for most applicationsā¦ and ofc one can just rearrange the drives so one uses as many lanes as possibleā¦ only have to use the multipliers before one is forced toā¦ and a sata pci / pcie card will do a full 6Gbit or even 12Gbit if the drives will support itā¦ depending on what one buys and if the pcie lanes can take it on the moboā¦
which again will most likely come down to the chipā¦
but yeah lots of interesting stuff and options out thereā¦ one just have to do the research and donāt buy to cheapā¦ because those who buy cheap, buy twiceā¦
but yeah a 100$-150$ mini comp ā¦ sounds like a fun buildā¦ and SATA rulesā¦ you can do tons and tons of drivesā¦ only really the bandwidth and the capacity runs out at some pointā¦ like when you get into the PB range or closeā¦ then an older sata controller will not be able to manage it, because it cannot keep track of all the spaceā¦ but you could split 1 sata controller out into like 150 hddās if one wantedā¦ of you would end up having so many wires its ridiculous and the bandwidth for each drive would like wise be near non existingā¦ like if we say 120 drives on a 12Gbit sataā¦ thats 100mbit for each ā¦ so 12mbytes/s or soā¦
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 otherā¦ but atleast the technology can do thatā¦
so go crazy, see what works and what doesnātā¦ so long as you can add maybe ram, pci / pcie and has sata portsā¦ then it canāt really go to wrongā¦ and really you will want some processing power if you want to run many nodesā¦ on one systemā¦ but thats again where the power savings comes inā¦
a tiny cheap system with good processing and expansionā¦ well then you are not stuck when you connected 3 drivesā¦ but you go to 20 if you wantedā¦ and might just throw a eSATA controller card in the system and connect dumb external hdd mounts / racksā¦ @kevink bought a eSATA disk box for like 100$, brand newā¦ with 4 hotswap bays
ofc no real meaningful electronics in the boxā¦ 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 outā¦ always fun to see the frankenbuilds people can come up withā¦
maybe i should try and expand my own server like thisā¦ before i get a disk shelfā¦ i got like 6 sata ports on the moboā¦ and they are kinda amazingā¦ i duno how they can be 10 years old and support like 20TB hddās
