this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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N100 Mini PC w/ 3xNVMe? (feddit.nl)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
63 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] 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 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] 6 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I work with real servers. SD card boot media is generally a bad idea. VMware officially semi-deprecated it a while back. Unless you tune your install to redirect typical I/O to the durable drives (which is going to be a pain, having to find and reconfigure all those services), typical logging to disk and various temp files are going to wear it out pretty quickly.

I would just use two drives and not separate the OS. That way, you also don't have to worry about the OS drive failing and taking down the server.

Just be careful if you reinstall. I'd suggest deleting the OS partitions first, then reinstalling to the empty space, instead of trusting the installer to do it properly.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I appreciate the suggestion but these are not N100 PCs. I'm looking for something in the $200-300 range. Those are just complete overkill for my purposes.

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

I wholeheartedly don't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Not even for the OS?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Nope.

Just waiting for failure in my experience.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 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 7 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 7 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 7 months ago (1 children)

SATA SSD would be acceptable also. I just prefer NVMe for compactness.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

NVMe isn't the compactness. That's just the interface that is used. The form factor is M.2. You can get SATA drives in the M.2 form factor as well. So if you do want an small form factor drive, make sure you look at if it is SATA or NVMe and which one your device supports as they are keyed differently.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 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 7 months ago

Yeah I've seen these DAS boxes before but from what I've read there are lots of speed and compatibility issues...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Haha. Yeah I did see that. It's an interesting product but ARM-based. Meaning it would be excellent for a NAS but not so good for a home server.

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