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Comment by riobard | Hacker News Reader

Some NUC models cannot house 2.5" SATA drives. For those that do, heat dissipation is an issue for 7200RPM drives. Plus max capacity of internal 2.5" hard drives is only 2TB, and depending on your use case it might or might not be sufficient.

Your use case does not seem very computation-depending. Maybe a cheaper Raspberry Pi-based solution will also work.

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> Plus max capacity of internal 2.5" hard drives is only 2TB

That's the maximum capacity of a 2.5" 9mm tall drive. You can buy Seagate 4TB & 5TB drives in 2.5" which are 15mm tall. [0] [1]

[0] https://mtekk.us/archives/reviews/hardware/seagate-4tb-expan...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Barracuda-2-5-Inch-Internal-S...

I did this with a square NUC. You need to remove the drive bracket and rely on a bit of tape instead. It will fit but I used the M2 slot to do cache for the big drive rather than have slow storage.

15mm drives are not really suitable for internal installation due to limited height in most NUCs.

Thanks for the advice. Yeah, a NUC would be way overpowered most of the time. A R-Pi and NFS probably solves 90% of my use case.

The RPi, even the 3, isn't a great choice for networked storage, since the NIC is running over the USB bus. A Beaglebone Black[1] would be similar but have better hardware for the job.

1: http://beagleboard.org/black

My understanding is that the Beaglebone Black is also... opener. Or at least it seems like the Beaglebone Black is supported by more operating systems. If, for example, you wanted to run OpenBSD or even Minix 3, BBB is the system for you.

I have a Beaglebone Black with a WD USB 2 portable HDD attached to it. I get only around 5 MB/s while copying (from Beagle to PC) a ~500 MB file over 5 GHz wifi. Not sure if this is because of USB 2.0 though.

PCEngines boxes would be pretty good for this too http://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

USB drives and ethernet share the same bus on RPi so NAS performance is not great.

A chromebox with a new seabios rom (so it can run a normal Linux distro) would be a decent compromise between those two extremes.

I have an Asus chromebox doing this, very happy with it.

If they cannot house 2.5" what size can they house then? Or did you mean 3.5"?

M.2 SSDs

Oh wow. I must keep up with the times then!

Those are PCI-e so they're substantially faster than their S-ATA equivalent.

Wow, chrisper isn't the only one who hasn't been paying attention. It's news to me too. These slot right into the bus, just like a hardcard! Everything old is new again.

No he meant 2.5"

Those models only have the "MacBook pro" "stick ssd" aka M2 SSD, which has a smaller form factor.

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