GnuBee Personal Cloud 1 – A NAS specifically engineered to run FLOSS

I&#x27;m in the market for a new NAS, but I don&#x27;t think this would have enough oomph to be very useful.<p>I understand that it&#x27;s by design, and that I&#x27;m probably not the target demographic, as others have pointed out, the 512MB of RAM, lackluster CPU and 2.5&quot; 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&quot; HDDs. It&#x27;s upgradable to an i3 or Xeon CPU, 16GB of RAM, and can be modded to take another 2 or 3 2.5&quot; drives.<p>I appreciate that it&#x27;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&#x27;s the point?

Nice. I&#x27;ve been looking for a low-power &quot;bring-your-own Linux&quot; board for a while. Classic DIY NAS builds consume <i>outrageous</i> amounts of power (35W to &gt;100W) compared to commercial NAS (~10W), and existing single board computers lack GigE and&#x2F;or &gt;=2 SATA ports.<p>I just wish they&#x27;d have gone for a standard uATX form factor for compatibility with a professional case (and 3.5&quot; disks). It&#x27;s ironical that the &quot;open hardware&quot; project has to come up with a proprietary form factor :&#x2F;<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&#x27;s the actual throughput? 2x1 GBit&#x2F;s should be 250MB&#x2F;s (or, after SMB overhead, 200 MB&#x2F;s) - but even on a beefy QNAP TS-1635 I could get out only 80MB&#x2F;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.

I would be 100% in on this if I could slot my existing 3.5&quot; drives in.

Great idea. One of the points made in the post is &quot;What kind of security is protecting your data? How can you audit that security?&quot;<p>Yet, many people would say that they rather trust their data with Google&#x2F;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&#x27;t seem powerful enough for media centers that transcode-as-you-watch like plex&#x2F;kodi, but would work fantastically well with the ahead-of-time-transcoding media server I created: splinter.com.au&#x2F;gondola ha - shameless plug<p>Edit: No, it wouldn&#x27;t run Gondola - not enough RAM, unfortunately.

In the same vein, any one know of a cheap (around 30-50$) dual NIC SOC?

I like the idea of an open source NAS but I don&#x27;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?

Though it doesn&#x27;t run FreeNAS?<p>Or at least something with ZFS.