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N100 Mini PC w/ 3xNVMe? (feddit.nl)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

49 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Not sure why this doesn't exist. I don't need 12TB of storage. When I had a Google account I never even crossed 15GB. 1TB should be plenty for myself and my family. I want to use NVMe since it is quieter and smaller. 2230 drives would be ideal. But I want 1 boot drive and 2 x storage drives in RAID. I guess I could potentially just have 2xNVMe and have the boot partition in RAID also? Bonus points if I can use it as a wireless router also.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

All of those HP minis have 2 NVMe slots. If you're looking for more bays maybe a QNAP TBS-h574TX (Core i3-1320PE) will bit your needs better. Or the Asustor Flashstor 6 FS6706T.

But I want 1 boot drive and 2 x storage drives in RAID

One other possible approach to this is to go with the 800 G4 or the 800 G6 as they also SATA port you can use for your boot drive.

You can also boot from a fast USB 3 flash drive, since it's your boot drive it won't be as bad as you think. Consider some servers boot from SD Cards and other low performance media with almost static images.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I do like the idea of using USB drives for storage, though…

I wholeheartedly don't.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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[–] realbadat 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Nope.

Just waiting for failure in my experience.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Though it could be cheaper to have a backup or 2, all identical bits stored on them and swap them out as(/if) they fail

[–] ITGuyLevi 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I have a few servers that have been booting from USB for years. Two of my old freenas boxes (now just hosting backups of data from unraid), have been booting off the same USB sticks for almost 10 years now. In addition to the freenas boxes I use internal USB drives on Unraid, ProxMox, and ESXi hosts (had to try them all).

Its a risk, but having a cloned USB as a backup can mitigate it a bit.

[–] realbadat 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

So just... Waiting for failure then? ;)

As for me, give me an HA cluster and I don't care if I need to reinstall. I don't need to worry about an additional point of failure (USB drive) that is almost always going to fail before any of the other hardware.

It's part of why absolutely nothing important ever runs on a raspberry Pi for me though, SD cards are no better.

Now as for my favorite example of why I don't do it in production? Someone doing a bit of minor maintenance in the rack, accidentally pressed against a box running esxi off USB (on a gen 6 HP for rough timeline), broke the drive.

The backup? Well, it had corrupted, and wouldn't boot.

[–] ITGuyLevi 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Oh man, that would suck. I do not ever use an external USB port for that exact reason! Aside from a few desktops and laptops around the house all my equipment has an internal USB port for the purpose of a boot drive (I always assumed that was the reason).

All production stuff needs backups. Personally I try to keep boot device backups saved to another device as an image so if one goes down, I can clone it to a USB real quick and restore the blink to the lights; ideally I should also keep them off site, but I don't like to use cloud providers (tin foil hat and all).

[–] realbadat 2 points 8 months ago

Wasn't my rack, thankfully, so it was someone else's problem.

But anyway even internal you're just leaning on when the thumb drive will fail vs an SSD and the onboard controller. So give me that SSD and HA any day of the week, but that's my comfort level. I even do it at home with my proxmox clusters.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (15 children)

You can get those machines second hand for the price range you specified.

About the USB storage, just be careful about what OS you're running. It is very important that you to manually configure the system not to write logs and other crap to the flash storage OR... you can pick something like Armbian (yes it does have a x86 version) that is already tweaked to run on SD card and other kinds of flash.

If cheap USB flash isn't performant enough maybe a USB SSD of some kind (there are some that are NVMe) will most likely work you. Anyway don't forget that USB may disconnect when pushed around and it can become a issue.

I frankly wouldn't run anything over USB because it is painful but it is an option. Maybe make a solid case for your mini computer and the hard drive and bolt everything down into place.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I'm currently running 3.5 inch HDDs via usb3.0 to sata. Working ok so far (time will tell) but I do need a plug socket for every one of them

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I don't think that you can have 3 pcie lanes on a N100 CPU

but you can have 2 sata in raid 1 as boot drive for truenas and 2 nvme in zfs raid 1

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Didn't LTT just release a video covering this exact topic?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I think you'll be out of luck for 3 slots, but you could always use the native slot for OS and dock the other 2 via USB with RAID capability in something like this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Using USB3 / USBC external storage for years.

Buy a good, non cheap, USB jbod or raid enclosure and put SSDs in it!

I have a 4 bay USB3 jbod plus a 2 bay USB-C box, inside the disks are all RAID.

Indeed internal disks / ssds / nvme are better, but consider that speed wise even USB3 is faster than any WiFi.

Just don't but they cheap and use good cables. And if you use spinning disks, ensure they stay cool.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Can you link the 4 bay that you have. I’ve been thinking of getting a 4+ bay recently but have no idea where to start.

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