ARM based DIY NAS solution

L

LiquidXEN0N

n00b
Joined
May 25, 2005
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28
Does such a thing exist?
Like a Raspberry Pi with SATA and more power.
I'm looking for a lower power solution to serve up mostly video.
 
all of them on the market so far run sata off the usb2 bus if they have it at all.
So you are running network and a drive off a single usb2 channel.
slooooow.....
 
Lower level boxes from Synology, Qnap, and other providers use ARM (and even some routers offer NAS feature). Their performance is quite unsatisfactory (10MB/s-40MB/s) on gigabit.

Here ya go

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822336015



Mid-level DIY NAS boxes from these same providers use the Pentium 4 or a Celeron IIRC

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108095

With these you can get around 80-90MB/s transfers

Full blown modern processors in the most expensive models, or in your average desktop DIY nas (i3, etc) will get you best performance (saturate multiple gigabit links if your disk topology can handle it)


So in summary, you will be quite disappointed with ultra-low-power. For 40w at idle you can go with a 3 gHz ivy bridge setup that will give you great performance.
 
Another answer, not much different than the above, No, Yes, soon.
None yet, the 64 bit server ARM's are only available through Caldexa, and are definitely not cheap.
Late this year/early next year you will begin to see cheap 64 bit ARM processors aimed at low cost roles like a DIY NAS. No idea of price, but they are expected to cost $20 to manufacture. Probably these will come with some variant of Ubuntu based 64 bit server.
 
You can put together a low power solution with a standard Intel cpu. Choose a low end (but current) cpu, a "cheap" motherboard without a lot of bells and whistles, and a psu with excellent low wattage efficiency. In a nas role, the cpu will spend most of its time idle. Sandy and Ivy are fairly low wattage at idle. Not "arm low" but low enough. Low wattage idle performance will be even better with Haswell and that's just around the corner.
 
I am currenlty running an Asus E350 board. Unless you are looking to do something other than simple file sharing for the video the C60 should be sufficient. If you are looking to setup streams for use on certain devices then it will probably be under powered significantly.

I went with the E350 and 8Gb of ram and my system is mostly idle even under load (no more than one concurrent stream). I should be able to fully saturate the gigabit ethernet once I upgrade the drives (currently on old 2x500Gb RAID 0). I did test with iPerf and got average results for gigabit speeds.
 
The only problem with looking for a E350 board today is that I didn't see many in stock last time I checked. Also the other issue is that most boards were opting for 5 internal SATA ports and one external. I really wanted to have 6 internal so board options were extremely limited.

Another option that does take a little more power, but since you mentioned torrents you might need it would be one of the HP Microservers. Not sure if you have looked into them, but they are a good bit faster than the E350 cpu and come with a nice small form factor (not sure what H/W you already have). I might be able to dig up the avs forum link that shows how someone modded it to allow for 6 drives (default 4). The price for a new one is roughly $380 for NL40 and then you will want to replace the ram so maybe $50-75 more for 8Gb of ECC memory plus drive costs.
 
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