Moving to OrangePi Zero 3, what are my storage options?

opulentocean@lemm.ee to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 20 points –

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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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).

Kinda... Nothing will be ideal in this setup, so I just want to know how to make the best with what I have. Thanks for the suggestion!

The best depends in what you need... What are your requirements in terms of capacity, speed and redundancy?

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.

Thanks! I'll see what options of powered USB hubs I got

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.

I mean, you can put a powered USB hub on that and get more ports if you want them.

Or get a USB drive enclosure that can take multiple drives.

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 😅

Its a little late now but you couldn't picked up a board from pine64 that had a pcie slot.

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.

[Thread #342 for this sub, first seen 11th Dec 2023, 17:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Why the most hdds?

Get a relatively new, with USB 2.0 and you'll be fine. Powered if its a 3.5"

No reason, really. Just had in my mind that this was the way to get the most storage, but then someone mentioned about a single HDD with 20TB of capacity and idk, this haven't even crossed my mind. Might need to update myself on current HDDs 😅 Thanks for the tip!

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.

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