Oh god the bend radius on those cables. Also atrocious sinking and warping. This is the kind of stuff I have nightmares about. Please if you're thinking of building a hardware project and have never done it before at least consult someone like me. I'll look over anyone in SF's project and give a list of things to worry over for the price of a coffee, just don't do this.
Hey there – I’m interaction designer at Nextcloud and did the exterior design of the box (little of the interior as that was indeed done by WDLabs).
We’re working on improvements to the box and the bends of the cables are something we take into account. Also the power cable sticking out of the back.
So being a fully open source project we are happy about any contributions, especially if you are knowledgeable in that field. In any case I will forward your recommendations to the team, so thanks a lot already! (I’m sure they also thought about these things so I’ll let you know.) :)
Look for right angle usb connectors. They're pretty useful when you're dealing with size constraints like this. I'm honestly kind of surprised that Western Digital didn't have a supplier that you could call up, custom cables seem like a natural thing for them.
Also just to add to this: The Nextcloud Box is a device running Nextcloud, not our main product. :) The focus continues to be the software, which is the server and the apps for syncing.
Why the focus on the Raspberry Pi? I've got one on my desk finally after years of using OrangePi PC's in prod environments at businesses, and the Raspberry Pi just seems limited with the shared I/O and lack of support for any kind of libre stack.
Currently testing out an OrangePi Plus 2E strapped to a touchscreen to replace the all in ones we use for another product, with good results thus far.
While I cannot judge on the merits of your recommendations (not being a hardware guy myself), I do want to point out that this is a project in collaboration with WDLabs (as in Western Digital), according to the website.
"Have never done it before" would not be a description I would apply to Western Digital regarding hardware products.
The website admits however, that this is more of a "reference device, meant to inspire and invite anyone to build their own", so I would not expect the most rugged quality. In any case, as you need to bring your own Raspberry Pi, it seems to be more of a product for tinkerers than for enterprise-strength reliability.
Well, I don't disagree with you, but I can add some merit to my recommendations.
1. Each cable has a bend radius recommended by the supplier. If this bend radius is exceeded (too small) then it is very unlikely that the cabling will function properly electrically, especially for high speed communications. Cross-talk, dropped packets, etc. If anything the supplier is off the hook for meeting their spec since it wasn't installed correctly.
2. The plastic insulation will take this for a while but two things happen to polymers with a constant stress on them.
2.a They suffer stress relaxation via creep. The long linked molecules will reach a new alignment over time. They will no longer be in their plastic range and settle in a new configuration. This could result in more crosstalk or even a complete insulation failure as a function of time.
2.b Flexible plastics typically slowly lose plasticity over time due to the breakdown of the plasticizer that made them flexible. (That nice new cable smell) Most cables have PVC made flexible due to these additives. If this box is warm due to the heat from the drive and pi, then it's entirely likely that the cable could further degrade under the constant strain and creep and fail. Causing not only thinning but brittle breaking of the jacket. It doesn't have to be visible breaking for it to stop working electrically.
Basically you can't trust your wire anymore. It could work forever. It could fail randomly. It could just cause communication errors that are hard to trace.
As for the box, they just used too much plastic and pushed the thing through the machine too fast without cooling. But then again, I am not an ultra expert on injection molding. It's an art. My recommendation would be "Have a sit down with your molder, these faults do not need to be."
The bends don't look that bad. Also what if the cables are designed to handle that bend? Do you know for sure they don't?
I'm sure you might be right but it unless I'm missing something I'm not sure any of your points can be entirely proven until you know who sources the parts and what extreme(s) they can handle, no?
The bend radius of a cable is all but universally at least 5-10 times the width of a cable. It's pretty safe to say that a bend radius of one, like this enclosure has, is out of spec.
Yes, it is icky, a bit scary the first time you put it together, but it works and doesn't break or cause issues.
Considering the cables are made by the same company as the box itself (WDLabs) and that we've sold almost 1000 boxes and haven't had a single person tell us the cables were problematic and considering I've personally put together a dozen boxes and taken them apart and together again many times and still encountered no issues I think I can safely say: it is just fine.
From the description on website, it appears to not bundle the computer, just the case and hdd. So, if we consider the HDD to be 60EURO max, having compared to other WD blue mobile disks (couldn't find the exact model listed anywhere), then that leaves you with 10EURO for the case. The total of 70EUROs may or may not include shipping, I couldn't figure that out without trying to place an order. It's not cheap, but that pricing isn't expensive either. If it includes a Pi 2, then it's cheap.
Strictly speaking that doesn't say it includes one, just that there's room for one. But I hope you're right. I've looked at the PDF instructions and still wasn't any wiser.
yeah, that is what it is. The price is lower than the separate USB3 hard drive kit from WD so it is hard to argue it is expensive, though.
The OS is put together by Canonical, until now it was based on Ubuntu 16.04 and they'll soon update it to Snappy Ubuntu Core so you get a fully 0-maintenance solution.
So you're buying a case and a hard drive, you have to put it together yourself, and it only works with a raspberry pi 2? Seems like anyone interested enough to buy this would just do it themselves.
A 1TB enclosed external USB HD from Western Digital costs $60 (see NewEgg, Amazon, or whatever's relevant in your country). This costs $80. So, the extra $20 covers a SD card and a few screws to mount a Raspberry Pi (not included)? Doesn't seem competitive at all.
The kit to compare it to is the PiDrive kit from WD, which costs alone more than our kit WITH case.
A normal external hard drive risks not working with a Pi. This 2.5" USB drive is optimized for low power usage, esp at startup and comes with a cable and charger which powers both the drive and Pi from a single cable.
Obviously, if you are looking for an external USB drive for your computer, this is all not relevant. But if you want to use it with a Pi or a similar board, this kit is far superior.
We use Nextcloud at our company (switched from Owncloud after the split). Will definitely pick up a few of these boxes to replace VMs, so ease of use a big plus.
That was my first thought as well. I kept waiting for the magic that never came.
However, if you look at the bottom it states that this case is a reference design, much like the Google phones, intended to be a platform upon which others can build new products.
It's not a terrible idea in general, I personally think it's potentially a great idea, but like you I do think the Raspberry Pi was a poor choice for this use-case.
Perhaps in the next revision they'll base it around something better suited, such as the ESPRESSOBin:
The Raspberry Pi is the obvious choice because it’s very widely available. :) Raspberry Pi 3 compatibility is coming with the next version.
For Nextcloud itself people like to of course hate about it being in PHP just for the sake of it. But the simple fact is that it enables a lot of people to run it. And if we want a viable alternative, then that is paramount.
This looks like a great piece of HW with a Drobo mini attached. It could be a great daemon/cron/storage box with only one ethernet port, but w/ three it seems they are positioning to compete with the ERL3 from Ubiquiti which has a MIPS-based cpu from Brocade.
I'm trying to figure out what this buys me versus a Synology box running DS Cloud (Synology's "personal cloud" app). With a Synology NAS I get:
* Data on my own box.
* Remote access via the DS Cloud app on devices, or the web app.
* RAID with an external backup drive.
With Nextcloud, it looks like I get:
* Data stored where ever I like, including my Synology NAS(?).
* Some kind of remote access, and it's stored on the NextCloud(?).
* On my own for backups, no RAID.
* No idea on pricing.
If it's dirt cheap, I guess maybe a Nextcloud is an option. But if it begins to approach the price of Synology's least expensive offers I fail to see the value.
well it is way cheaper than any synology solution, plus that the whole stack is open source so you can actually trust that it does what it says it does. If you care about privacy and security, that is a plus.
It also will probably be slower than most synology solutions and more manual work - we'd like to improve that of course but that means we need help as this is a community effort, not a commercial thing.
Yes it would, but a board who isn't inhibited by sharing the USB and network on the same bus and is supported like rPI wouldn't cost this kind of money. I'm quite surprised about the price (70€ with free shipping over EU), which is very tempting for someone who needs an external drive anyway.
I hope there is more in the future to come in this area to bring the notion of home owned appliances instead of the cloud. Specially with IoT around the corner - those devices should communicate to a home server like this only.
> I hope there is more in the future to come in this area to bring the notion of home owned appliances instead of the cloud.
NAS boxes are relatively popular, and the major vendors are heavily leaning on making them the "all-in-one" home/soho servers as demonstrated by the wide range of applications available to them:
We've made the box hardware-compatible with the oDroid C2 so people have an upgrade path - I understand Linux 4.10 will have out of the box oDroid C2 support so it shouldn't be too much after that that Canonical's Ubuntu Core will support it, too, and users can pick one up if they like.
Here's the thing. If you want storage, you've got to use ZFS or be very brave and use BTRFS. RAID and single drive solutions are not going to cut it. Bit rot is a real thing and assuming you care about your data you want checksums and redundancy. If you don't want to think about it: set up a FreeNAS/NAS4Free appliance. If you do, build something slightly custom. To date, I know of no complaints maimed products that fit this criteria. It is frustrating, but family photos are not replaceable so don't take chances.
While this is likely true at the consumer level, it is not true at the enterprise level. Raid6 is used extensively, and the file hash is stored in metadata, separately. The files are walked periodically to detect and repair corruption. The same is done for parity. This has to be done with zfs too, via zfs scrub. I just don't think you can directly compare zfs with raid, as zfs is a filesystem and therefore implements some of the same things that other companies end up building on top of raid with their own custom filesystems.
I did not realize there were RAID implementations that did block level checksums.
ZFS is both a file system and a block layer. You would use RAID + ext4 or ZFS. The block layer parts of ZFS are comparable to RAID and are superior in many ways, including the most important: checksums.
So, can anyone shed some more light on what "Nextcloud" (the software/OS part) actually is? As far as I can gather it's more or less a fork of owncloud by one of the owncloud maintainers, paired with ubuntu core, and turned into a kind-a-sorta groupware and file server? But for some reason lacking an ldap/kerberos/ad/directory server - so it can't be the only part of a small office network - you still need ldap/AD set-up?
I'm not entirely sure I see the value proposition here.
It's a very recent fork of ownCloud, so if you know what that is, most of your knowledge transfers. It's basically self-hosted Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive, with some initial support for other cloud-y things: web-based document/spreadsheet/presentation software and chat/call/video conference being the main two. The value proposition is all in the self-hosted part. If you have a problem with giving a third party access to all of your files, this is a possible alternative. If you trust Google/Microsoft/Dropbox with your files, your life will probably be a whole lot easier letting their massive engineering and ops teams manage servers and software for you.
It's definitely not an all-in-one small office solution, there's no email app.
You can run that together with a Dovecot for example. It integrates nicely with Nextcloud Contacts for autocompletion and Files for attachments. Testing and contributions are very much welcome! :)
Just to add to what Scott said: One important part is that the Nextcloud Box is just a device running Nextcloud. It’s not the main product. :) We focus on developing the software, which is 100% open source and at https://github.com/nextcloud
(Disclaimer: I used to be Design Lead at ownCloud and moved to Nextcloud.)
Looked the document, and the real interesting thing is the split cable used internally, i.e. a cable that splits usb3-micro-typeB into a power-and-usb2, that cable seems neat, is it a customized one only for this product, or a generic cable that you can find on ebay? I happen to have RPI and the same WD USB3 hard drive here and with this cable I can try owncloud without the enclosure right away.
It's just the software that is "cloudy." Nextcloud is not being used because of this product, but rather Nextcloud just also provides this box. Kind of like Nextcloud + this box = convenience, but you can just do Nextcloud without it.
As a side note, AFAIK WD "USB only" disks may pose a problem (in case of issues) because they (or at least most of them) have a form of pass-through encryption, i.e. the data on the disk is encrypted and is decrypted on-the-fly by a chip on the PCB, if a component of the PCB fails, recovering the data becomes very, very difficult even if the hard disk works otherwise fine.
Not a good idea. As a personal anecdote, I had my 1TB HP simplesafe drive crash and I lost lot of precious pictures from recent years [Before moving to cloud]. The drive was Western Digital and none of the recovery software worked. You run the risk of drive failures with these and also not easy to migrate data once data grows or hardware evolves.
That is why use Cloud as a backup. But have the box sit in between to speed up data delivery.
I always wonder why this never have worked out. Most of today's Internet users aren't even running on 100Mbps. Why are we moving to all cloud? Why No physical box in between?
For example Time Capsule that backups to iCloud.
The software seems similar to sandstorm (sandstorm.io). This has a more integrated/opinionated app experience, rather than a software platform for apps of one's choosing? I can live with PHP, but Java is not something I willingly depend on. I suppose if I don't have to diddle with anything, I could live with Java.
1. it is open source so you can actually trust it
2. it is based on software used in serious enterprises so if you want more of it, you can get that
3. it has a big and healthy ecosystem of customers, contributors and apps so it isn't going anywhere
I had an existing Synology NAS, and never ended up getting an external USB drive. And then I guess I was hoping some software would just come out for my NAS that would do something similar.
Well, this is part of why we forked it to Nextcloud (disclaimer: I used to be Design Lead at ownCloud and moved to Nextcloud).
We’re focusing a lot more on stability and innovation, and if you look at the Github statistics, you’ll see that our activity surpasses ownCloud’s by a magnitude.
unless, of course, you care about security or a project that is, well, alive... There have been 1 or 2 commits in the last month so I wouldn't bet my data on it.
But I'm hopelessly biassed, working for Nextcloud, so please check github for yourself when you pick a solution for your data - at least look at the pulse over the last week or month before you pick a solution. If you don't know it, here is ours: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pulse
it shows you the activity in the project. For comparison, this is bad: https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/pulse
Again, I'm biassed, so make your own conclusion, don't rely on mine. I'm just pointing the way.
personal storage of "important stuff" doesn't need RAID, it needs BACKUPS. RAID offers protection only against a comparatively tiny subset of risk factors.
If I compare the amount of data I could have lost (or have lost) over the years, non-existent backups would have been way more fatal than non-existent RAID.
My post was maybe to strictly worded, RAID is nice and helpful, but it was responding to a claim that it is irresponsible to advertise a non-RAID device for important data, which is IMHO irresponsible itself, because it suggests that's all you recommend relying on.
I dunno, hard drives stop working basically at random in my experience. RAID is extremely helpful if your device is physically safe and not prone to infection.
Plus, there's only so much you can back up to the cloud. I'd back up 125GB of personal pictures, but not 1.25TB of ripped Bluray media.
both are needed in the end if you want to be full covered..
backup will cover human errors (ops I deleted the wrong file),
RAID will cover hardware failures
having only one of the two solutions will expose you to some risks
The case is designed to be able to house a 2nd 1TB hard drive. We don't have software support for RAID yet but we would welcome contributions very much.
I agree with some others here that backups are more important and this would have priority from my pov. Sadly nobody has built a complete backup app for Nextcloud yet.
My raspberry 1 was totally unstable and corrupted itself in the order of days. Therefore I wouldn't even be most concerned about hard drive reliability in this case.
