Good day folks, I’m wondering, is it possible to use one of those dog cheap , new or used mining motherboards, nvme adapters, and some used enterprise nvme ( or regular) sticks and make an all flash nas on the cheap?
you’re not going to roll out any large amount of flash “on the cheap” but do you at least have an example board?
most of them with the many slots end up with just single lane slots, and they’re quick but they bring things down almost to SATA drive speeds
That’s an interesting concept and depending on the board it might work, but probably not as great as you are perhaps imagining.
Cryptocurrency mining, unlike storage, is not bandwidth intensive so mining rigs are designed to let you connect 16 or however-many GPUs each at 1x of PCIe 3.0 or even 2.0 which will bottleneck even the cheapest QLC nvme drives.
It is very similar to the concept behind those Astor “Flashstore” nvme NAS devices that let you attach 12 nvme drives which all share, I believe, 6 PCIe 3.0 lanes between them. Each drive is severely bottle-necked but combined still have way more than enough bandwidth to saturate a 10Gbps network connection which is likely plenty for most purposes.
Typically all the slots provided by the mining rig will be 1x and while you can use one of them for a 10Gbps network card, you will be limited to about 6Gbps actual bandwidth after overhead which you could likely saturate with just a couple SATA SSDs.
Software support will likely be your biggest issue. Those boards were designed with a very specific use case and software in mind and depending on the board it may not play well with your OS of choice. You would likely want to do a bit of research when choosing a board.
All in all something like the Flashstore or one of those PCIe cards that let you attach a bunch of nvme drives are probably more robust solutions, but admittedly cost way way more than a used mining rig.
If you end up trying it post back here with your results, it would certainly be a fun project if not an entirely practical one.
Example board.
Sorry about the late reply.
So that board has 8 PCIe 2.0 x1 slots. Each drive would be limited to 500 MB/s max; about what you get from a SATA SSD. Your total bandwidth would be about the same as a single PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot.
If you don’t care about bandwidth and only care about volume you could fit 8 NVME SSD drives on that board, but performance-wise it would be the same as attaching 8 SATA SSDs which would likely come at a lower cost per gigabyte and you could do that on a motherboard that is otherwise much more expandable.
I understand.