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Comment by frontlodjkgi | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just build any NAS and chuck Debian on it if you didn't care about the OS and vendor software to begin with?

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e.g. QNAP has rare hardware combo of half-depth 1U low-power Arm NAS /w mainline Linux support, 32GB ECC RAM, dual NVME, 4x hotswap SATA, 2x10G SFP, 2x2.5G copper, hardware support for ZFS encryption, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40868855.

In theory, one could fit an Arm RK3588 SBC with NVME-to-PCIe-to-HBA or NVME-to-SATA into half-depth JBOD case. That would give up 2x10G SFP, 2xNVME and ECC RAM.

Maybe it's just me, but rare harware isn't something I'd look for in a reliable storage system unless I had a really special need general hardware just couldn't be made to do

"Rare" in this case is referring to a unique offering, not to the availability of that particular part.

As I understand, migrating to other hardware wouldn't be an issue if availability becomes an issue.

Per sibling comment, "unique" is a better descriptor than "rare". The NAS is made in Taiwan and has been readily available from Amazon or QNAP store.

The Marvell CN913x SoC has been shipping for 5 years, following the predecessor Armada SoC family released 10 years ago and used in multiple consumer NAS products, https://linuxgizmos.com/marvell-lifts-curtain-on-popular-nas.... Mainline Linux support for this SoC has benefited from years of contributions, while Marvell made incremental hardware improvements without losing previous Linux support.

This is spot on. I'd like to add that unique often in hardware is not forcing people to buy a few times to get it right, especially first time buyers.

Rare more means a unique combination of common hardware products, where other manufacturers don't put all of the features into one piece of hardware like qnap or others might, to keep people buying more devices to get what they want, or buy a device that is way too overkill for their needs.

I ended up doing that with a larger QNAP I had. It did have some odd bugs that I needed to track down, but otherwise was a good (albeit overly expensive) NAS. I used zfs.

Storage should be an appliance, or you're the appliance repair man always on call.

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