Silent and efficient 2-bay NAS

dvpfig · Oct 13th 2020

Hi,

I'm looking for a hardware solution for a small home NAS.

The requirements are:

*most silent possible (fanless)

*idle power 2W or less

* reasonable speed for data access at home

*2 drives of 1TB

*RAM of 4GB should be good (preferably DDR4)

Currently I'm loooking at coupling

Odroid C4 (with Gbit eth to router)

2 SSD drives (with two Cables USB 3.0 to SATA III)

The new odroid C4 as a new Cortex A55 quad core, RAM DDR4 but lacks SATA interfaces hence have to use USB cables.

Would this be a bottleneck?

I could go for an older but proven Cortex A53 based SBC board.

But I haven't seen a good SBC that handles temperature without fan well and has both SATA3 interfaces and DDR4 RAM.

What would you suggest differently?

Thanks.

/Daniel

ryecoaaron · Oct 13th 2020

In my opinion, the RPi4 or the rock64 are more stable than the odroids (I have a lot of all items). ddr4 means very little on an arm board. I run my rock64 with no fan and my rpi4 in a flirc case (no fan). The rockpro64 can have a sata pci-e card as well and doesn't need a fan either.

dvpfig · Oct 24th 2020

Thanks for the reply, ryecoaaron .

After a lot of going around checking, I have not found an obvious better setup than RPI 4 and I decided to go ahead for the NAS with the RPI 4 and a Flirc case as you mentioned.

metRo_ · Nov 22nd 2020

Quote from dvpfig

Thanks for the reply, ryecoaaron .

After a lot of going around checking, I have not found an obvious better setup than RPI 4 and I decided to go ahead for the NAS with the RPI 4 and a Flirc case as you mentioned.

Have you finished your setup?

kirkdis · Nov 25th 2020

is the rpi4 really below 2W idle with OMV installed? I don´t own it myself but heard that the idle wattage is above 3W...

ryecoaaron · Nov 25th 2020

Quote from kirkdis

is the rpi4 really below 2W idle with OMV installed?

OMV being installed doesn't change it but no, the rpi4 is about 3.5 W. You might be able to get it lower by underclocking it but for 1 watt, I think that is pointless.

memilanuk · Feb 4th 2021

Late to the party, but maybe something like this might be an option:

Project TinyMiniMicro

Not nearly as low powered, but depending on which model you get, may have some interesting options as far as USB ports (5 or 10 GB/s), internal M.2 or SATA III connectors for SSDs (sometimes both), and room for gobs more RAM.

Participate now!