Hello,
I do not know if this is the proper place to ask, but there already are attempts to build a RISC-V NAS, like this one:
My question is:
does the company behind TrueNAS has any plan to build a Risc-V NAS?
Risc-V is open source hardware and is and an obvious match with True NAS.
The attempt mentioned above is a proof of concept, it is nice and it works, but it would be very interesting to have a professionally built device for serious use, with much more RAM and reliability.
Doing that will take some time, but how much? Is it a matter of months or a year or many years? At least is there the intention to do that?
I do not know if iXsystems reads this forum. Anyway it would be interesting to know what you all think about that. A general theme is:
there are a lot of Risc-V boards already available and many more under development, but which are the requirements to make a NAS with a reliability and power comparable with a professionally built one like those of ixsystems?
I’d doubt it. I’d expect ARM to be more likely, but iX isn’t biting on that either:
But if Debian 12 and OpenZFS run well on RISC-V, then there might be a fair chance of building TrueNAS for it.
Keep in mind that, at least last I checked, iX’ systems were built using commodity server hardware. So before they’d start selling anything on this architecture, there’d need to be suitable server-grade motherboards available. This looks adequate, even if there are some suboptimal design choices (and some frankly weird ad copy–installing a 10G NIC turns it into a network switch?), but it’s pricey:
But with a few minutes of Googling, that’s all I could find in a standard PC form factor. ARM is in this regard a better choice, in that there’s a selection of server-grade hardware out there using that architecture.
Keep in mind, TrueNAS is really built for the Enterprise. While it can run on lower-end gear, that’s not what it’s designed for, and that’s not what iX sells. It isn’t intended to run on a NUC, and we’d universally say that’s a bad choice of hardware. Similarly, the ${FRUIT}Pi SBCs and the like really aren’t suitable for its intended use case. You need a motherboard that will fit in a standard PC/server chassis, allow for 10GbE or faster, and have enough PCIe lanes for a SAS HBA (or lots of PCIe lanes for NVMe storage). Oh, and large amounts of RAM. AFAICT, that hardware just isn’t out there yet in RISC-V.
I agree with @dan, RISC-V is just not there. Probably not for at least 2 years.
Some server boards can work as a NAS. But, actual server boards designed FOR network attached storage, (NAS), usually require more storage ports than some server boards supply. So even after more ARM or RISC-V server boards become available, using some of them as NAS might be more improvisation, instead of designed for NAS.
Plus, their should be some options for things like IPMI and or ECC RAM. Very useful for servers.
Last, at present, most RISC-V cores just are not as fast as modern Intel or AMD x64 cores.
(I am not talking about Intel or AMD cores designed for low end or low power, that don’t perform as fast. Both companies make serious performance CPU chips with high performance cores, in various configurations.)
Already and intriging find… Though I’m somewhat annoyed that after reading the whole description I still don’t know if it uses UDIMM or RDIMM.
Apparently, the whole system is hosted in a case with a big handle. 5 SATA ports. If it could run TrueNAS I know of a (no longer so) secret agent who could put the hardware to use.
US$115 for eight cores and 16 GB of RAM in a mini-ITX form factor with dual Gbe NICs, a NVMe port, and a PCIe slot (though only two lanes of PCIe 2.1, so it won’t be a speed demon). No onboard SATA, though. Still not really suitable for a NAS IMO, but it’s a pretty reasonable price in a standard PC form factor, so definitely a step or two forward.
