Re: News : ARM Trying to Buy AmperComputing

On Mon, 20 Jan 2025, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

On 1/20/25 3:53 PM, D wrote:

  On Mon, 20 Jan 2025, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
 

On 20/01/2025 09:30, D wrote:

  The Pi hat or OMV ?

 The pi, with directly connected spinning disks. Does the hat have its own extra power supply?

 I've managed to get a P4 I think to run one spinning rust disk without extra power.
Strictly it depends on the disk.
The pi hat for 5 drives has an external 60W PSU

 Ahh, if it has an external PSU then there is no problem. Ideally, if the pi hat for 5 drives is intended to accomodate 5 spinning drives, it would be nice if it did so at full speeds.

>
>
 One review said the WRITEs were a little pokey,
 but not TOO bad. READs were apparently snappy.
>
 This is OK ... most stuff on HDDs is "write once /
 read more often".

Hmm, do you have a link? What does "a little pokey" mean in terms of writes? If it is only performance and latency related, then it is ok, since the software will take care of a lot of that for me.

Given that the server manufacturers seem to no longer want to produce smaller, cheaper nodes, but only want to sell huge GPU machines, I'm contemplating if it actually might not be possible to build a nice archive solution on pi:s, spinning disks and a few cards at a good price.
 To be continued... as the saying goes.

>
 Yep ... lemme get in and fool with my 5-drive unit
 a bit and I'll write a hands-on report. The price
 is good enough (the DRIVES are $$$ alas)

Great! =)

 Even without the SATA hat ... you CAN run a number
 of external USB 3.x drives from a Pi. Won't be as
 quick, but it works OK.

My plan, if it works, is to pitch this to a company, so I think the USB way, although ok for home use, would not be accepted. =(

 And yea, I know what you mean about everybody trending
 towards "overkill" boxes/systems. Better $ margin I guess.
 Still no shortage of motherboards - so you can build
 your own "appropriate" boxes.

This is the truth! I wonder if it would be possible to 3d print boxes for custom components at a good price? If the pi-road works, I could imagine a nice custom printed part of the chassi to enable nice plug and pray replacement of pi:s! Just pull out a pi module, replace, and go! =)

 For an NAS, it's the drive speeds that are kinda the
 limiting factor, so even a 'slow' motherboard won't
 hurt anything. It's all I/O-bound.

As long as the reads and writes are taken care of I'm planning on using some software defined storage solution to help me handle that. Maybe the solution is to add a ssd as a cache or something, or split the data to be written across several spinning disks. What worries me with flaky storage is massive rebuilds.
Hmm, is there a way to get Pi:s on a 10 Gb network? Or are they limited to 1 Gb only?

 The popular Sinology canned NAS units - 4/6/8/12 drive
 units with multiple network plugs - all use basically
 laptop-grade 'Celeron' grade processors.

Synology are trying to enter the enterprise market! I encountered them in a discussion with a university where they proposed to store 1 PB on their biggest product. Since they use some kind of linux inside, they had all kinds of weird limitations on the nr of files in the same directory etc. Very strange, but it was enough to point at the limitations to get the university to drop them like a hot potato! In the end I did not win, because my customer references where too honest (it's a great solution) vs the competition who obviously orchestrated their customers (it's like having a friend who does everything for you, I never touch the storage, the vendor does anything I ask). =( Well, let's see how happy they are once the signature is on the dotted line.