Alternative to Asustor Flashstor + Video Idea

[Benjamin2]

Dear all,

i had the thought of using the BTC Mainboards which have a looot of PCI 1x Slots and use these with the PCIe 1x to M.2 Adapter Cards.

 

The Mainboards are fairly cheap and the PCIe adapers have no addidtional chips on them which means that there is no additional powerdraw.

overall it should be a lot cheaper then the Flashstor and more customizable.

 

Example:

ASRock H110 Pro BTC Mainboard ~50 Bucks

+

PCIe Adapter ~5 Bucks

+ Some Usefull CPU (Performance is the Weakness of the Asustor)

+ Some Ram

 

Overall it should have some decent Powerdraw.

 

What do you think about this approch?

 

Regards

Benjamin

 

 

[Kilrah]

PCIe2 x1 slots, so no better than SATA.

[Benjamin2]

Thats a good point.

That means i would need to pick a Mainboard with PCIe3.0

For Example the Biostar TB360-BTC PRO 3.0 which would raise the price to ~140 Bucks

That would raise the speed to gross 0,97 GByte/s

[jaslion]

1 hour ago, Benjamin2 said:

Thats a good point.

That means i would need to pick a Mainboard with PCIe3.0

For Example the Biostar TB360-BTC PRO 3.0 which would raise the price to ~140 Bucks

That would raise the speed to gross 0,97 GByte/s

It's barely better than sata tho. 3.0 x1 is only 8gb/s so as you said 1Gb/s HOWEVER this is assuming no pcie overhead which with these btc boards is often a thing as they do tend to use a pcie switch.

 

Also at this point just get a lsi raid card and some sata drives? Cheaper and won't really be slower once in an array. That is a lot more price affordable and customizable as 2.5 inch many slot enclosures for enterprise are a dime a dozen on the use market or trashpile.

 

Also you really DO NOT want to have vertical non secured nvme storage. A bit of a bump and a good chance they dislodge or get bad contact.

 

I see where you are coming from but in reality you'd be better off just going sata and a good chance you won't even notice a difference in performance. You seriously need to hammer a sata ssd nas before it becomes an issue. Like keep in mind a zfs pool is a pool that means the data is on a bunch of drives and you can easily get 1GB/s on a sata array due to how data is stored across storage devices. A raid card is made to handle that whilst a sata controller on a board will cap at 600MB/s normally.

 

For example my 7 drive zfs pool of samsung 850 evo 1tb drives gets about 1.2GB/s read and like 550MB/s write which is great really. Caps out a 10Gb link full and then some read wise. Write wise sure not the best but on nvme that won't be a lot better. I am mostly limited by the xeon gold 5217 in that system as when I synthetic read and write test hit it, it will go to 100% usage or near it.

 

Also keep in mind the faster you go the more cpu you need and well a i7 10700 for example would NOT be a bad choice.