Is there a general place for hardware recommendations?

General Discussion
1

Are general hardware recommendations around that I did not find? There are so many options that I am lost.

I’m looking for the best hardware for my data host. It should be capable of hosting 2 TB of nvme storage and consuming as little wattage as possible. It should be powerful enough to run syncthing without problems.

I’ve got an Odroid M1S, but I can’t get it to work with dietpi, so I’m willing to purchase an alternative. But I don’t know which one is best.

2

I like this guys take on this new little NVME NAS thingy (not a cheap SBC though)

Could get one of those NVME hats for SBC’s

3

Lately I was also looking for cheap device to set up a NAS,and I found this:
https://de.gmktec.com/products/gmktec-nucbox-g3-plus-intel%C2%AE-twin-lake-n150?variant=50663568605368

It’s not ARM, but has just a TDP of 6W and it will run circles against e.g. RPi 5.
There is a spare M.2 slot (only PCIe 3.0 upto 2 TB, but that’s enough for me) and it’s pretty cheap, 130€ for 8GB/256,GB version.
Comes also with WiFi 6 and 2,5Gbit Ethernet. :+1:

But it has no GPIO, which you probably don’t need for a NAS and it’s not as cheap as the odroid.

Edit:
OK I see the M1S is half the price, but has only PCIe 2.1 x1 (which should result in ~400MB/s, which should be enough) and “only” 1Gbit Ethernet (which is probably also enough :sweat_smile:) and has a typical power draw of 3.7W.
Idle power is the nucbox is around 12W (I got confused by the TDP, which is about heat and not power consumption) and under load it’s easily doubled, so I guess the M1S is the better deal here and I think the limiting factor will be the Ethernet speed. Even with 2.5Gbit you are capped at around 250mb/s.

1 Like
4

and comes without SSD :wink:

Fun fact: the GMKtec NucBox G3 Barebone (without RAM and SSD) is around 120 €
while the system with 8GB RAM and 256 GB SSD is just 9 € in addition (129 €) :rofl:

5

My research so far:

I tried an Odroid M1S and an NanoPi M6.

None of them is pain free. I can’t find a way to run either of them completely from the m2 drive.
Even if I boot from sdcard, emmc or spi there is no way to put the root fs onto the m2.

Is there something I am missing?

If not, what other device is capable of running the root fs on an m2 drive?

6

If works, I got a Lenovo ThinkCentre M710Q with a 2TB SSD, 8GB Ram and works perfect. Maybe I will change to a 4TB SSD at the future, but so far works with no problem.

7

Thanks, that’s a good alternative - at least for temporary usage. For a 24/7 I want less power consumption. The best compromise so far is still the Odroid m1s. I can install DietPi in EMMS and put data onto the m.2
The only disadvantage is that the installation is complicated. And I don’t know if an update will break the installation.

8

For testing I have some device running from SSD directly

RPi 5

root@DietPi5:~# lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
nvme0n1     259:0    0 119.2G  0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0   128M  0 part /boot/firmware
└─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0 119.1G  0 part /
root@DietPi5:~#

Orange Pi 5

root@DietPiOPi5:~# lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
mtdblock0    31:0    0    16M  0 disk
nvme0n1     259:0    0 119.2G  0 disk
└─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0 119.2G  0 part /
root@DietPiOPi5:~#

And one of the two NanoPi’s R5S or M6. I’m not sure anymore whether it’s just one or both.