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Adoby · 12-24-2018, 04:39 AM

I had not a lot of space left on my old 12TB Synology 411j NAS. And I didn't want to put in even bigger drives. And it was slow.

So I started looking and comparing alternatives. Odroid HC2 was pretty new then so I bought one and a big 12TB Ironwolf drive to test. After some looking I decided on OMV as the dist to use.

I was very pleased with the performance, it can easily saturate a GbE network connection and it is pretty cost effective as well. At least if you calculate price per TB using the biggest NAS HDD you can find. The cost of the Odroid HC2 is dwarfed in comparison to the price of the HDD then...

The Odroid HC2 is a very tiny single board computer. About the size of a matchbook. 2 GB DDR3 RAM, USB 2, GbE and one SATA 3 port. ARM. And 8 cores. It comes with a big aluminum profile that is used for cooling and for mounting and protecting a HDD. Also the aluminum profile can be used to stack several HC2 together. That gave ideas...

So I ordered four more HC2s directly from Korea. Two are currently used as my "front line" storage nas. Two are used as my "behind the line" backup nas. One, with a 512 GB SSD is used as an app server where I run things like Emby, LMS and NodeRed and I also use it for system backups of the other servers.

All the servers are connected together in a GbE switch. And I access them over a fast wifi mesh, Asus Lyra.

If I need to I can easily move HDDs between HC2s or even to my desktop PC. And access the contents. So I got HW backup as well.

If I ever need more storage I can just add another HC2. And another. Scales well... There are 14TB Ironwolf HDDs available now.

I considered using some distributed filesystem like glusterfs, but decided not to. At least for now. I prefer to keep it simple. With more HC2s that may change, then glusterfs might simplify things.

The old Synology 411j is mostly turned off and used as offline backup.

All clients are either Linux or Android. I also use the storage servers for backups of my clients.

12-24-2018, 04:39 AM	#12
Adoby Handy Elephant Posts: 1,737 Karma: 26785684 Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: Southern Sweden, far out in the quiet woods Device: Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra	I had not a lot of space left on my old 12TB Synology 411j NAS. And I didn't want to put in even bigger drives. And it was slow. So I started looking and comparing alternatives. Odroid HC2 was pretty new then so I bought one and a big 12TB Ironwolf drive to test. After some looking I decided on OMV as the dist to use. I was very pleased with the performance, it can easily saturate a GbE network connection and it is pretty cost effective as well. At least if you calculate price per TB using the biggest NAS HDD you can find. The cost of the Odroid HC2 is dwarfed in comparison to the price of the HDD then... The Odroid HC2 is a very tiny single board computer. About the size of a matchbook. 2 GB DDR3 RAM, USB 2, GbE and one SATA 3 port. ARM. And 8 cores. It comes with a big aluminum profile that is used for cooling and for mounting and protecting a HDD. Also the aluminum profile can be used to stack several HC2 together. That gave ideas... So I ordered four more HC2s directly from Korea. Two are currently used as my "front line" storage nas. Two are used as my "behind the line" backup nas. One, with a 512 GB SSD is used as an app server where I run things like Emby, LMS and NodeRed and I also use it for system backups of the other servers. All the servers are connected together in a GbE switch. And I access them over a fast wifi mesh, Asus Lyra. If I need to I can easily move HDDs between HC2s or even to my desktop PC. And access the contents. So I got HW backup as well. If I ever need more storage I can just add another HC2. And another. Scales well... There are 14TB Ironwolf HDDs available now. I considered using some distributed filesystem like glusterfs, but decided not to. At least for now. I prefer to keep it simple. With more HC2s that may change, then glusterfs might simplify things. The old Synology 411j is mostly turned off and used as offline backup. All clients are either Linux or Android. I also use the storage servers for backups of my clients.