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Helios4 Personal Cloud - The Open Source NAS
Hey guys,
I know this project was already mentioned in another thread but I wanted to make it a little bit more obvious.
Let us know what you think about this NAS project ?
Using the same Marvell Armada 388 SoC than Synology DS416j and WD EX4100, but with more memory, highest CPU clock, much cheaper and on top of that completely Open Source.
Comments
If I had a dollar for every multi-SATA ARM-based Open-Source low-power-draw consumer-targeted storage appliance boards that have been promised over the years but never actually materialized, I could easily fund this project myself.
Post again when I can purchase & have it shipped to me that same week
You should add at least 10 more rewards to ensure they are completely confusing.
Crappy ARM, I guess you can expect about the same Benchmarks as NS2800 Atom.
Get a cheap case for 30-40EUR. with 4 drive slots, get a Atom motherboard mostly 50EUR + 40EUR PSU, 20EUR for some mem.
If you build it yourself you can do the same for about 150EUR without drives.
I'd rather pick up an older i3 box that can be had for cheap, will completely blow this thing out of the water - albeit at the cost of more power usage, but still low enough for me not to care.
I'll stick with my hp microserver.
It's actually cheaper to buy a used HP microserver. With cash back you could get a new one for that price.
Drop the price to £50 and maybe
For the footprint this is a very powerful board in a lot of ways. I do agree that to be less confusing the main event should be the entire units (case, etc), minus drives. It is a bit confusing to look at buying just the pieces of it, in a general use case.
For me I think my limitation of purchasing separately was the fact there was no additional pci-e or way to add additional SATA ports outside using a cheap port multiplier. There is two USB 3.0 ports, but I am not sure if this makes up for it or not.
While I enjoy the idea of low power consumption with these ARM boards, I can see the angle of those saying just buy an old x86 board and pay the extra for the power knowing you can add/have as many ports as you would like and not be limited. Their footprint however would be much larger than that of this device as well as their power usage, so there are some trade-offs.
There are also some pluses to the design of the Helios4 you can't get elsewhere though. If you are someone who would look at purchasing a Synology or similar unit anyways but want the extra ability to customize your operating system and tweak things to your liking, then this should be one of your first choices. They offer you the whole nine yards: on-board power for the drives supported on a single power supply without the need of an extra power supply, 2 GB of Ram (more than most other units on the market), Gigabit NIC, USB 3.0 and a performant dual core 1.8Ghz CPU all in this tiny package with support and funding of some great open source distributions such as Armbian.
Of course it will depend what your really looking for but with the onboard raid engine and other performance optimized options offered by the Marvell chipset this should, as I see it, be considered a very competitive option in it's market (should it be funded).
Let's hope for the best!
my 2 cents.
Cheers!
I've 10 orange pi various type, maybe add some other pi brand, I bought them because they cheap.
for the Helios4 price, 100% I take intel atom instead
price is expensive and not user friendly to new user
@TheLinuxBug, thanks for your review.
In case it really wasn't clear, there are only 2 different kits :
Both kit exist in a 1GB or 2GB RAM variants.
Concerning perf, the Armada388 will beat your Atom in any IO tasks, without mentioning the built-in encryption engine and parity calculation engine.
The root of the project was to develop an ARM based board with 4x SATA 3.0 in the smallest form factor possible without trading off performance. Then from there to do a cool casing that takes a fraction of the usual 4-bay NAS size.
For sure there are many other alternatives, but I think we offer the perfect recipe for people looking at small foot print, power consumption, flexibility and performance.
A storage board is an interesting niche in the ARM board market, and one that is needed.
Here are my thoughts:
Anyway, it's a cool little project, and I hope it works out. A little storage dev board would be a good addition to the landscape.
@flatland_spider
You can boot either from eMMC (sdcard), USB, SATA or network. The is an onboard SPI NOR flash that will store u-boot. From u-boot the booting options are almost endless.
Well if you discount the UART and I2C pins on the raspberry pin header, you will have 22 GPIO. Including the expansion header, Helios4 offers 20 GPIO.
Marvell shows great openness and contribution effort for Armada SoC family (https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors). Current Kernel supported by Marvell is 4.4, next target will be 4.9 (LTS) therefore ready for future Debian Stretch.
We would have love to offer something under the $100 but with a SoC like Armada 388 is just completely impossible.
You can hot swap, even though the casing design is not necessary ideal for it.
This is what Helios8 will offer :P
I was thinking of the eMMC modules Hardkernel uses on their ODROID boards since it has higher performance then SDCards. (http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G145622510341, http://www.hardkernel.com/main/_Files/prdt/2016/201602/C2BoardDetail.jpg)
SDCard or USB boot is enough for version 1.
Cool. This would make an excellent little sensor collection point. Add a wireless NIC (Bluetooth, Zigbee, or whatever industrial sensor networks use) via a shield, or something, and it should be good to go.
That's good that they have a Github page.
Alright, LWN has an article about Armada 38x family having upstream support. (https://lwn.net/Articles/585738/) People aren't going to get stuck with Debian or some randomly old kernel, so progress!
Yeah, I understand. Small batch, trade offs, etc.
That is the one ARM SoC I've run across that can handle this sort of thing.
Excellent.
Considering all of my cases are solid black, it's strange I like the case. I'd like the case a lot more in a translucent black, to be more conservative. Also I'd like a much bigger case to accommodate more drives and of course a board that accommodates more drives as well. I don't get how so many people are satisfied with 4-bay NASs. Plan to add more storage ever?
My question is are you sure it's not that much more costly to grab a Atom Baytrail CPU. Offers a lot more flexibility
Sounds too much like "Helion" to me and I still bear scars.
>
I know what you mean. Sometimes I wonder if 24 bays is really enough.
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Something like the UP Board 2 or PC Engine APU2 with more SATA/M.2 ports? That would have been nice. 3D print rack mount cases, and start a Packet.net competitor.
I'm guessing this board already existed and minimal engineering was needed.
Regardless, it's interesting enough for me to follow.
Just wanted to post an update to announce that we launched a Helios4 Lucky Draw to help us get some attention.
Simply enlist to WIN one of the following prizes:
Anyone can register to the competition: win.kobol.io/lp/29509/Helios4
Am I correct that the only way to participate is via Facebook?
That means:
(1) I'd have to have a FB account. I do, but
(2) I'd have to enable apps, which is a neverending source of privacy abominations. I'll take you at your word that you're respectful of privacy, but the point is that I have to enable the platform, which I'm not willing to do because for 100% of things I've encountered so far, there's either an alternate login (which removes the FB tracking risk) or it isn't that important.
But I'm just one guy...maybe other potential participants have a different opinion. I just hate "Facebook account is mandatory" things.
This is exactly why I have two Facebook accounts.
And exactly why I have zero.
Hi guys, @ihadp @deadbeef
Originally we used facebook sign-up mode to avoid as much as possible cheating.
Anyhow, we have just updated the sign-up mode to email ;-)
Please go to the same url : http://win.kobol.io/lp/29509/Helios4
When does the contest end?
who are you? are you part of helios4 team?
They are part of the team.
link are safe not aff
Hi All,
A little update that might satisfy some of you.
We have just introduced a new KIT with 2GB of ECC memory.
We have received quite a lot of demands for an ECC option, while it was quite a premium feature (cost wise) we finally decided to offer the option for a little extra money.
Only 7 days remaining to snatch Helios4. We need your support guys.
http://goo.gl/ECMtQ5
Cheers.
@Gauthier
You know, I keep wanting to consider this but what keeps stopping me is that even if I paid 200$ USD for the set, I still have to pay another 42$ in shipping to get it to USA. Why the heck does it cost you guys 40$ to ship this thing when most distributors from China ship for 50-80% less than that? This is the killer in the end for me, even if I can justify the 200$ for the board (which is hard to do - ECC does help) I have a hard time justifying another 42$ (the cost of an ESPRESSOBin) just to ship it to me. At that point it gets hard not to consider an off the shelf solution from a larger vendor (who will ship the unit to me for free).
I kinda wish I had the money to contribute because I like the project and I think you guys have done a good job, but it just seems to be too cost prohibitive.
my 2 cents.
Cheers!