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Comment by harvie | Hacker News Reader

I would be totally happy with PCIe based hat that has PCIe to SATA interface with 4-6 SATA ports (with at least one of them being bootable). I know SATA SSDs are not newest, coolest nor fastest. But for home NAS setup i would find it totaly acceptable. Unlike the USB port sacrificing and "loopback" USB cable mess that is usualy used by older raspberries in order to mount SATA drives.

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I have a radxa jmicron hat on a pi4 and I did a zfs 4 disk set-up precisely so I could move to Sata on pci-e and move os with these drives. A cm4 carrier board with data or pci would do, but no matter what I too want to stop using usb to do things.

The zimablade looks interesting: 2 sata on board and a full pci-e slot, Intel quad cpu, fanless.

Hmm but that hat connects to the Pi over usb?

When will we get a Pi for storage that doesn't need to use usb?

Edit: i took a look at the zimablade in spite of the atrocious web 5.0 site with silly animations getting in the way of getting to the specs.

Nice. 2 x gigabit ethernet when?

> Hmm but that hat connects to the Pi over usb?

Yes. It's all I could get at the time. I chose zfs to allow me to move disks to true sata over pci when I can.

The 5 appears to allow a pci bridge to be used. It's possibly my next move, I've had the radxa hat for a couple of years now.

And where would you get power for those sata drives?

Most SSDs are 5V only, so I assume Orange Pi users just get an adequate wall wart.

Sata port does not provide power.

Sata has a standardized data port and a standardized power port. The power port usually has multiple voltages connected which would complicate things if they mattered.

If you want a NAS, buy a NAS. I really don’t get people’s desire to take an underpowered single board computer and try to turn it into a useful server. There are absolutely places where a Raspberry Pi makes sense, those places are where you’ve got electronics you want to interface with complex software that can’t viably be run on a smaller MCU.

All computers are NAS if you stick S on them and A them to an N, the Raspberry pi is no different, but it's got a great advantage in that it's small and relatively power efficient. I turned a Dell Optiplex USFF into a NAS (https://willj.net/posts/fitting-two-hard-drives-and-an-ssd-i...) but in the same space I could easily fit 4+1 disks instead of the 2+1 if I was using a far smaller motherboard.

As for being underpowered, again it depends what you are doing with them. For my NAS (basically long-term storage of stuff I don't access much and tiemmachine backups) there would be plenty of CPU, the biggest problem would be memory.

*edit* Just to be clear, the Pi has some massive drawbacks as a NAS at present because of it's significant lack of disk IO, but there's nothing inherent in it's form factor that makes it a bad NAS. If I could have plugged 2+ HDs into one in a performant way I'd likely have done that rather than the Dell Optiplex shenanigans.

> If you want a NAS, buy a NAS. I really don’t get people’s desire to take an underpowered single board computer and try to turn it into a useful server.

Off the shelf options tend to have awful software, pis have good power consumption, and as of the 5 is it really underpowered?

Pi has superior long term support and even better community support. Loads of options for upgrades and extensions should you need one in the future. Also once i decide that i don't need that NAS anymore, because the pi would be obsolete or slow in the future, i can just take that pi out and use it for some other DIY project.

An underpowered single board computer is plenty for a basic NAS. Certainly a more expensive and more powerful single board computer would make a more expensive and powerful NAS, but a lot of people have modest needs.

A consumer NAS for most people is like, the least demanding device ever. All it needs to do is stream video at most, probably not even 4K, maybe not even that if you're just doing backups.

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