I'm in the market for a new NAS, but I don't think this would have enough oomph to be very useful.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
Nice. I've been looking for a low-power "bring-your-own Linux" board for a while. Classic DIY NAS builds consume <i>outrageous</i> amounts of power (35W to >100W) compared to commercial NAS (~10W), and existing single board computers lack GigE and/or >=2 SATA ports.<p>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 :/<p>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.
The big question: what's the actual throughput? 2x1 GBit/s should be 250MB/s (or, after SMB overhead, 200 MB/s) - but even on a beefy QNAP TS-1635 I could get out only 80MB/s despite having a RAID5 of 10x WD RED disks.<p>This tiny thing will not go very far in terms of bandwidth. If you want bandwidth you will need a HW RAID controller.
Great idea. One of the points made in the post is "What kind of security is protecting your data? How can you audit that security?"<p>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).
This doesn't seem powerful enough for media centers that transcode-as-you-watch like plex/kodi, but would work fantastically well with the ahead-of-time-transcoding media server I created: splinter.com.au/gondola ha - shameless plug<p>Edit: No, it wouldn't run Gondola - not enough RAM, unfortunately.
I like the idea of an open source NAS but I don't think this is the way to go. I would like to see a low power linux boards with two sata connections. This way you can have dual disks in a mirror situation. With multiple disks, you could easily add a new linux board as well. Something like the BananaPi comes close, although I doubt their QA deppartment.
Interesting project for low cost NAS. However, why is it open to air? It seems to me that it would gather quite a bit of dust and be susceptible to damage. Is this required for fanless operation?