We’ve been watching people from all over the globe do crazy things with Raspberry Pi computers for years. The usual thing is to get one of these plates to make your own console, a small media center for the living room, or even to make a small NAS. But always with its limitations, of course. Well, the youtuber Jeff Geerling has done with a typical server rack and has tried to mount a professional NAS using only a Raspberry Pi as a brain.
Can a Raspberry Pi manage an entire server?
If you’ve ever connected a hard drive to a Raspberry Pi to make a small home NAS, you’ll know that as much as you can build a NAS with one of these boards, the performance is usually no wonder. In fact, any basic NAS with one or two hard drive bays will give us a much more interesting experience.
But that preconception hasn’t stopped Jeff Geerling , who has set out to move a server with a single Raspberry Pi. To do this, he first bought a rack with a capacity of 1.2 Petabyte . This rack had, how could it be otherwise, with a motherboard with an Intel Xeon. The storage would be possible thanks to a team of 60 Seagate disks of 20 terabytes each .
David against Goliath. The Raspberry Pi vs. the Xeon Gold
The madness had only just begun. Can a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with four cores and one PCIe 2.0 lane stand up to an Intel Xeon Gold 6230R with 26 cores and 48 PCIe 3.0 lanes? Obviously not, but Geerling had to try. In fact, the processor is not the only possible bottleneck in this setup . The Raspberry Pi can move 10 times less data through its network card. And the original motherboard has 32 times more RAM than the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, not to mention speed and latencies.
An experiment that we already knew how it was going to turn out
Results? Well, as an experiment, it’s not bad, but when it comes to putting this into practice, the server is leaking everywhere. We don’t know if Geerling had a good time assembling his team, but he sounds like the process has been pretty frustrating. Configured in RAID 0, Rasbperry detects the massive 1.2 PB volume, but no one in their right mind would store important data on a system as vulnerable as RAID 0. Trying to manage a different RAID configuration, Geerling ran into all sorts of problems . Hence even the youtuber himselfend up recognizing that the Raspberry Pi is not designed for such a large project. Therefore, it is a partial success. You can create a huge NAS managed by a simple Raspberry Pi, but the performance will be nothing short of spectacular.
The moral of this whole video is that if you want a NAS, buy it and don’t complicate your life so much. There are many options from well-known brands such as Synology, Qnap or Asustor that allow almost any inexperienced user to set up a small home server. Of course, it will not be as much fun as building a system with 60 disks and a server rack.
