Santa will not come up with an efficient Pi-based architecture for NAS. Also not in history (10+ years back to the first RPi). Those BCM SoCs have only SDIO/MMC for storage, the rest is glue- or I/O- logic. That is why I bought BananaPi (Pro, M1+) after my first Pi1B. It has SATA on-chip and connector on-board (also a power connector, only 5V though). Same as with all credit-card sized boards, only the less power-hungry 2.5inch devices work. I have an old Sandisk SSD rated 0.6A, that worked/works. But it is more interesting to use for large 3.5inch HDD, although it is only SATA2 and 2xCortex-A9, it has Gbit RJ45. As you know, 32-bit cannot handle >8T for Btrfs, so a 64-bit CPU is what I need. Or 'SAN', testing that now.One of my main concerns for making a two-drive Pi-based NAS is the power supply. However, how to properly cool a case made out of porcelain tile is also a blocker.
I'm hoping Santa comes up with a solution.
A bare BCM2712 with 2-lane/4lane M.2 for NVME SSD and a PCIe-SATA3 chip and PCIe-ethernet 2.5Gbps RJ45 world be great as I don't see what I should do with the RP1 chip. But of course this never happens as RPL's hope should be RP1 I guess. Otherwise everyone can see that RK35xx SoCs have multiPHY PCIE/USB3/SATA lanes so plenty of single SoC boards that can do NAS.The most obvious one is Odroid-M1, although also that one has no 12V for HDD and CPU is only Cortex-A55. Fast enough for NAS 1Gbps, but people always want the fastest/overkill.
So it seems there is no sub-100 dollar Arm SBC that can also feed a high-end NVME + a large 3.5inch HDD from 1 PSU. I have some old PSUs with molex connector (both 5V and 12V). I think the 5V is good enough to power a low-end Cortex-Axx based SoC, that is the least amount of work. At least less complex than BCM2712<->PCIbus<->RPT1<->USB3connector/cable<->USB_SATAchip<->HDD (excluding power wires still). Also I have 6.12 mainline working good enough for NAS/server, that is actually most important.
Fallback is still some N100, but also with those boards, it is either no SATA or 4x SATA.
Statistics: Posted by redvli — Fri Nov 29, 2024 10:56 am