Re: [gentoo-user] Suggestions for NAS appliance?

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2021 at 11:06 PM Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com> wrote:
>
>
> Not a recommendation precisely but there's a guy on YouTube named Jeff Geerling that's doing a lot of that sort of thing using a Raspberry Pi and multiple SATA drives. I've just built my first RP4 box aimed at astrophotography and I'm pretty impressed with how well the Pi works. My next project will likely be some sort of NAS box using a second Pi4 with an M.2 system drive.
>

I run LizardFS and at this point Pi4s are my preferred hardware for
storage nodes.  However, I don't deal with much IOPS.  I tend to use
USB3 hard drives for convenience/cost.  Really though SATA on a Pi4
wouldn't be super-ideal anyway due to the lack of PCIe (I think it
lacks it at least).  You can find ARM SBCs that have PCIe capable of
handling an HBA which are probably better if you want a bunch of SATA
drives, though those have their downsides.  If you're serious about
IOPS I'm not sure anything cheap will do the trick.

I would definitely avoid Pi2/3 for this due to the combo of 100MBps
networking and USB2 and a lot of the IO goes through USB2 in the first
place.  It is just not a very good setup for IO at all, and there are
much better alternatives.  The Pi4 though is pretty solid as long as
you don't mind USB3 (and it has two hosts so you can basically run 4
spinning disks all-out without a performance hit until you get to the
network at least).

Gigabit network is its own bottleneck for any kind of storage.  I'm
too cheap to try to use anything better, but anybody doing serious DFS
is going to want 10Gbps, or often dual 10Gbps.

-- 
Rich