Fanless All-SSD 4-bay NAS

[icecrash]

I've been wanting a quiet 4-bay NAS for my home, but haven't been able to find any compact or fanless ones. However, I think I might have stumbled upon a solution.

The CWWK N100 Fanless Mini PC has supports PCIe Gen 3x4, with 1 GB/s per lane. It looks like CWWK is planning to release an adapter board within the next week or so to take the PCIe 3x4 M.2 slot and split it into 4 PCIe 3x1 M.2 slots.

This seems like it could be a compact, affordable solution. Not sure about the clearance in the case, but it seems like if you get 4 low-power M.2 SSDs (e.g. SK hynix Gold P31), and maybe some thermal pads to transfer heat from the SSDs to the case, you could have a pretty powerful all-SSD fanless NAS.

Quad 2.5 Gbps ethernet + 4 SSDs + the 6W N100 process seems like a perfect setup for a lot of home NAS solutions. The idle power draw will likely be quite low compared to conventional 4-bay NAS setups.

With SSDs approaching $50/TB for 2 TB and 4 TB capacities, you are looking at roughly a total system cost of:
$800 for 8 TB
$1200 for 16 TB

With a 16 GB DDR5 RAM module, it should even be enough to run ZFS (I believe the recommendation is around 1 GB of RAM per 1 TB of storage).

What do folks think? Does this seem like it could work? Any caveats folks can think of or any other solutions that might be better?

 

[itronin]

With SSDs approaching $50/TB for 2 TB and 4 TB capacities, you are looking at roughly a total system cost of:
$800 for 8 TB

concur for used enterprise 7.68 SATA SSD's price < 800 now.

$1200 for 16 TB
...
What do folks think? Does this seem like it could work? Any caveats folks can think of or any other solutions that might be better?

where are you finding new or used 16TB SATA SSD's for $1200?

 

[icecrash]

The new N100-series revision of the fanless Mini PC described here: Topton Jasper Lake Quad i225V Mini PC Report
has a PCIe 3x4 M.2 slot. CWWK, the manufacturer is releasing an adaptor that splits the single M.2 slot into a board that will allow 4 M.2 SSDs to be used for those, each with their own PCIe 3 lane (so 1 GB/s max for each SSD)

For some more context, here are some pictures:

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I was not suggesting installing a single 16 TB SSD, as that would be prohibitively expensive. With this adapter board, you could install 4x 4TB low-power M.2 SSDs in the fanless device. I think you would want low power ones, as the thermal constraints might be limited. An example of a low power 4 TB SSD would be the Acer Predator GM7, which according to Tom's Hardware, idles at around 0.76W, and uses 3-4W when active. The SK hynix Gold P31 idles at an impressive 0.36W, but it maxes out at 2 TB. At that point, it might make more sense to just use 2x4TB SSDs, or maybe 1x8 TB.

With the adapter setup, you could have a RAID/pool with a 4 GB/s max speed, which seems plenty fast for the 4x2.5GbE that the unit comes with. Even if you bonded all 4 together, that would only be 1.25 GB/s max for a 10 Gbps connection (although most likely people would just do 2.5 Gbps and call it a day).

Since I have not tested this, I don't know if what I am proposing is a good idea. I don't know the reliability of this setup, and I don't know if the thermals will work out. I was hoping others could provide their insights before I try it out for myself.

 

[itronin]

fwiw, spinning disks can easily max 2.5gbe .

I understand your jist. 16tb total capacity ie. 4x 4tb. okay pricing makes more sense.

 

[mattventura]

I feel like a lot of these "cheap 2.5gb NAS" things that have been floating around are a bit of a trap. IMO, if you're talking about an $800-$1200 price tag for the whole system, it makes sense to spend a little more on the base system so that you're not looking to upgrade in 2 years.

2.5GbE is a >50% bottleneck for the sequential speeds of even a 6gb SATA SSD. Bonding isn't a great solution because it doesn't typically increase single-host speeds, and 2.5GbE switches aren't cheap on a per-port basis. Not to mention you'd need to pay more for a managed switch to actually have bonding in the first place, and even 4x 2.5GbE is going to be just barely enough for a single Gen 3x1 NVMe.

If you're okay with a near-silent fan, that opens up a lot of options, since you no longer have to worry about using the absolute lowest power components. Something like a Xeon-D board might give you 2x 10GbE built-in, ECC memory, and 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes so that you can upgrade more down the line without having to replace the whole board. I don't know what your electricity costs look like, but even assuming it uses 30W extra power (which I think is a high estimate), that's only 22kWh/mo, or about $2 a month for me.

 

[unwind-protect]

With a 16 GB DDR5 RAM module, it should even be enough to run ZFS (I believe the recommendation is around 1 GB of RAM per 1 TB of storage).

That recommendation is baseless. With 16 GB you can run any ZFS fine. It just gets higher performance if you give it more cache.

 

[dtk31883]

Where can I buy the Cwwk m.2 nas adapter? I would like to try it with 4 Optane drives as a cache for my sata drives. What kind of performance does x4 118gb Optane at pcie x1 get? Optane 118gb are pcie x2 right?

 

[itronin]

optane 800p 118gb is x2
optane p1600x 118gb is x4

with x1 I would expect that you do not have to worry about the performance of the optane as the x1 will in all likelihood be the limiter.

"cache" going to depend on OS/filesystem. Unraid? ZFS? etc. etc. etc.

 

[dtk31883]

Ok, depending on your setup, does the m.2 adapter only transfer pcie gen3 x1 (985MB/s) to one ssd at a time or all 4 ssds using the pcie gen3 x4 lanes (3940MB/s). I understand the p1600x reads and write are greater than 985MB/s individually ( 1760 MB/s Read/ 1050 MB/s Writes), could a raid 0 with 4 of these drives reach the 3940MB/s pcie gen3 x4 performance theoretical?