Hi everyone! I recently moved my services from a Hetzner VPS to an OrangePi Zero 3 and I was wondering what options do I have storage-wise? How could I plug the most HDDs possible on this thing? Does anyone have a successful setup that might want to share?
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
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What a weird choice for a storage-oriented device, I would have gone for a SBC with SATA ports or a PCIe port.
It wasn’t exactly a well-thought choice 😂 I wanted to host my services locally so I had to choose between going for an old computer/NUC or a Raspberry Pi and chose the latter because it’s not that power hungry. But then Raspberries are very hard to come by and even with the launch of RP5, they still look like very overpriced. So looking for alternatives, I came by the OrangePi, which sounded like a fair option 😅
You could’ve just got a board with USB 3 and Gigabit ethernet for that price. https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=279
Or this… https://radxa.com/products/rocke/pie/ or… https://radxa.com/products/zeros/zero3e/
About the NanoPi Neo3
This little thing gets pretty hot with the official case. I had to cut a hole in it to hot glue a tiny fan, powered by the GPIO.
I can’t remember the temp. difference right now (it’s unplugged) but it was significant.
Oh yes, but I never tweaked it and I haven’t had issues with it.
I never heard of any of those SBCs. Pretty interesting, thanks for the tip!
Sure no problem, general rule pick something that is supported by Armbian or will be like the Zero 3e. This will give you way better future support including kernels even after the manufacturer no longer supports the device.
You bought a device with just one single USB 2.0 port and ask for the ideal storage option?
I could be wrong, but you’re probably limited to one external HDD (~20 TB) and one micro SD card (1 TB).
My concerns with using external storage on a Pi is backup.
Drives fail, externals even more so.
I suppose you could add a powered USB hub. But you’d really want a backup/replication plan to something like Backblaze B2, etc.
Quick question about the hubs. I saw some with 5+ ports. Using USB 2.0 I know I’ll have some limitations on speed, but could I for instance, plug 5 HDDs and this speed would be evenly divided among then (given a moment where they all would get written at the same time)? If only 1 HDD is being written, would it get this full speed? Is this math that simple or are there more things that I’m not considering?
devices on the hub share the total bandwidth to/from the host system’s usb port. data going between drives on the same hub has to travel to the host then back again.
so: transferring files to/from a single drive will go ‘full speed’, transferring files between two drives on that hub will run at about half speed, accessing data on all the drives on that hub at the same time (such as syncing a snapraid array built on externals all connected to that hub) will be painfully and brutally slow.
