On Sun, Mar 1, 2020 at 2:13 AM William Kenworthy <bi...@iinet.net.au> wrote: > > Keep in mind that rpi are not the only cheap, capable arm hardware out > there. >
I completely agree. Anytime I'm looking at an application I consider the SBCs available as options. Certainly the odroids are highly spoken of. Main advantage of the Pi is its ubiquity - just about anything you could want is already packaged and documented for it. It is also pretty cheap. > backed by an Odroid HC2 moosefs cluster (though I am using an intel > powered Odroid H2 for the master). I considered an HC2 for lizardfs. My problem with it is that it has a single SATA port, which means you're buying a $50 SBC for every hard drive in your cluster. For a single drive per node it is probably your best bet. However, my chunkservers are: ~$65 RockPro64 $20 used LSI HBA $5 wall wart $25 cheap ATX PSU $5 ATX power switch $5 extra SATA cables $5 powered 16x PCIe riser cable (these are a bit hard to find) That is ~$125, and will support 16 hard drives. You're saving money on the 3rd drive per node. If you want some kind of enclosure for the drives you'll pay maybe another $5/drive. The other option that might be worth considering if you don't mind losing some bandwidth to the drives is just using SATA3 and hubs/etc and external drives. I'm shucking external drives anyway. So, any SBC with a SATA3 port would work for that, with nothing else needed. I could see USB3 bandwidth (shared) being a constraint if you're rebuilding, but it would keep up with gigabit ethernet. Oh, and for any kind of NAS/etc solution make sure that whatever you get has gigabit ethernet. The Pi3s at least don't have that - not sure about the Pi4. Wouldn't help in a Pi3 anyway as I think the LAN goes through the internal USB2 bus - the Pi is pretty lousy for IO in general - at least conventional PC IO. That GPIO breakout is of course nice for projects. -- Rich