I understand that it's by design, and that I'm probably not the target demographic, as others have pointed out, the 512MB of RAM, lackluster CPU and 2.5" drives are all pretty disappointing.
This is estimated to cost $168. For $250, you can get an HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 Entry, which comes with 4GB of ECC RAM, a 2.3Ghz dual core x86-64 CPU, dual gigabit that supports line-speed link aggregation, and takes 4 3.5" HDDs. It's upgradable to an i3 or Xeon CPU, 16GB of RAM, and can be modded to take another 2 or 3 2.5" drives.
I appreciate that it's fully open, which is definitely a massive appeal, but if I need to run another machine (with blobs) next to it to actually operate on the data, what's the point?
At 10 watts, there is a good opportunity for some power savings. I have an Atom-based HP MicroServer and it lives in the area of 30-40 watts idle with 5 3.5" drives. Going down to 10 watts would mean saving around $40/year for me, not bad, but not enough to worry about.
The biggest failure with this in my mind not supporting 3.5" drives. Getting decent capacity in the 2.5" form factor is not really possible, and if using SSDs, in that case you'd want a more performant machine like you describe. Then again if using SSDs, why not just use an even smaller form factor.
The GnuBee matches the Synology in price and exceeds it in functionality (aside from the 2.5" drives - seems like an extremely odd choice).
I think the problem with this product is you have two categories of NAS buyers - the ones who want plug and play storage on their network, and the ones who want the best performance and all kinds of esoteric features.
The former will go for a commercial solution like Synology/QNAP, the latter will go for something like what you suggest or a home-made solution.
This product targets the former in specifications, but the latter are the ones who care (or probably are even aware) about open source. Add to that that open source software usually has dreadful usability...
I'm deciding between drobo (plug'n'play) and a DIY freeNAS right now. If the price is right I'll do the DIY freeNAS.
In Denmark, where I live, they go for 1700 DKK[2], which is $242. Want me to ship one for you?
[1]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/HP-Enterprise-ProLiant-MicroServer-...
[2]: https://www.computersalg.dk/i/1211353/hpe-proliant-microserv...
I just wish they'd have gone for a standard uATX form factor for compatibility with a professional case (and 3.5" disks). It's ironical that the "open hardware" project has to come up with a proprietary form factor :/
I also wish they had ECC RAM and enough of it for ZFS, but I know that is technically impossible with the price and power constraints.
??
Commercial NAS (like non-RM Synology & friends) are not magic. They save a bit of power due to higher system integration, yes, but most power is saved simply by using low-end hardware.
Most x86 DIY NAS use either desktop hardware or low-end server hardware (usually same thing, different labels) -- most of these have far more compute power than the small Atom C2000 or similar found in a x86 NAS.
If you want something similar to a commercial NAS, then use low end Mini-ITX boards (<10 W TDP, usually four SATA ports and perhaps one PCIe) or a PCEngine.
ARM boards on the other hand are all rather weak in all regards: poor I/O, little memory, weak CPU cores (even if there are four of them), quite some of these boards also have stability issues. None have ECC.
Good luck doing a build with an overall 10W consumption target with x86 and what is essentially desktop HW, especially if it should be affordable (relative to a ~250€ commercial solution) and maintainable (no, no custom kernels with weird patchsets that rot away in 6 months, and having to recompile the world).
We have used PCEngine boards. They're fine as network appliances. But even the latest ones only have 1 SATA port (fine, 2 if you count the mSATA port).
This tiny thing will not go very far in terms of bandwidth. If you want bandwidth you will need a HW RAID controller.
They say that they plan to do a 3.5" version nebulously in the future, but, my god, that's such a backwards decision. There is much more market for the larger model.
Yet, many people would say that they rather trust their data with Google/Facebook than self-host or use some random provider or host it at home. Is this a common shared sentiment? Just wondering if this opinion is shared among a more technical HN crowd (most of them use gmail even on HN).
Edit: No, it wouldn't run Gondola - not enough RAM, unfortunately.
http://www.banana-pi.org/r1.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Newest-arrive-BPI-R...
If you can get by without a powerful CPU, lots of memory, etc, there's lots of cheap multi-NIC routers that will run openwrt/LEDE.
It's been a while since I messed with that though.
Or at least something with ZFS.
Seems like MediaTek MT7621A is supported in FreeBSD… except… without SATA :D Shouldn't be too hard to add SATA support though…
UPD: oh, they use the ASM1061 PCI SATA controller, that one is supported!
