The newer B+ variant has 2x M-key, that is what I know. There might be others, I think I also saw 4x M-key really dedicated for NAS.Hello,It should not be a problem to power from 1 source, as PC ATX PSU can deliver hundreds ow Watts. Also a 12V (car)battery of lets say 100Ah can easily get it all started.
But a Pi based solution is complicated and crippled w.r.t. performance. I would use 2 ASM1166 M.2 boards and stick those into a SBC with 2 M.2 M-Key connectors on-board. You get then 12 ports for about 30 euros. And an ASM1166 is 2-lane PCI-E 3.0 so about 1400MB/s throughput for 6 HDDs, more than enough, also fine for SATA SSDs. Most alternative SBCs have SPI-flash where you can put your own bootloader, mainline U-Boot supports JMB and ASM SATA chips out-of-the box, you can also boot from SATA then. I have done that with a cheap 2-port JMB on a M.2 E-key slot. It can also do UEFI mostly, so you can boot like a Linux PC with GRUB. Also 2.5Gbe might be standard on-board. I don't know how you are going to organise the HDDs, JBOD? RAID?
The idea with SBC with 2x M.2 and 2 pcs M.2 boards with ASM1166 looks interesting. I looked and found only Radxa ROCK 5B which has 2x M.2 (1x M.2 M Key, PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes, for NVMe SSD and 1x M.2 E Key, PCIe 2.1 x1 lanes, for WiFi6). Do you know any other similar SBC with 2x M.2? I want run it with configuration RAID 1 with OVM (OpenMediaVault).
Thank you
For RAID 1 you do not need high CPU performance. I use on-the-fly zstd:3 compression, you need Pi4 (cortex-A72) or better for that otherwise no sustained 1 Gbps throughput is my experience. But not applicable for Ext4 (assuming you use that on top of MD-RAID1).
Statistics: Posted by redvli — Sat May 03, 2025 9:24 pm