Kobol Team Is Pulling the Plug from “Helios64 Open Source NAS”

https://blog.kobol.io/2021/08/25/we-are-pulling-the-plug/

by nixcraft • 5 years ago

118 40 5 years ago

blog.kobol.io

xtanx• 5 years ago

Nooo. I really wanted a Helios64. Good luck to the team and I hopefully someone can create a similar product.

simjue• 5 years ago

Same for me. I planned to replace my old NAS with a Helios64 :-(

mnd999• 5 years ago

This feels like the 80/20 rule in action. These boards mostly work but had (in my experience) non-trivial reliability and quality issues and they would have been expensive and tricky to get fully right.

The cynic in my says another company will probably pop up shortly with a new Icarus128 NAS board.

starbugs• 5 years ago

That is really sad. The products looked really good and I had the feeling they were targeted at a very interesting niche that definitely needs to be covered.

squarefoot2• 5 years ago

Sad news indeed, the Helios64 was promising although some users reported instability issues, but after some work it could have become a killer product. It's all Open Source though, so hopefully other people can join and take over the development/production, also showing in the process one more example (do we still need them?) why Open Source is the better choice.

jeremycarter• 5 years ago

Still running my original Helios4. Hasn't missed a beat for 4+ years.

dtx13• 5 years ago

I STRONGLY recommend getting a new PSU asap. The PSUs they send are dying one after another at the moment and mine likely took the board with it.

paulhart• 5 years ago

As another currently-happy Helios4 owner, any recommendations?

hajhatten• 5 years ago

Wish the team good luck in their new endeavors. You definetly had me impressed.

wronex• 5 years ago

Does anyone know of a similar product? I'm particularly impressed by the built in UPS and five bay storage.

alexfromapex• 5 years ago

Yeah that's a great idea for saving space and would be perfect if it automatically shut down after the battery gets low

3np4• 5 years ago

Doesn't exist AFAIK unless something new was announced in the last couple of months that I missed - I researched quite a lot a little bit back.

Somewhat similar scopes but without both of those:

https://wiretrustee.com/raspberrypi-cm4-sata-board/ (not launched yet)

https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/sata-hat/products/pe... (they also have an enclosure kit)

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/ (just 2 drives; I have one as a sink for automated ZFS snapshots using zrepl; a friend is using one for syncthing+apple time machine sink)

If you want something within the coming ~2 years and any of the above don't fit your bill I think you'll have to resort to x86 and an external UPS. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.

dpedu• 5 years ago

I have a somewhat similar project based around the raspberry pi. It's rather DIY compared to Helios64's project - 3d printed case, hand soldered electronics, amazon sourcing - though the goals are similar. Specifically, my goals were to host 2x 3.5" drives and to be printable on a standard 200x200 mm 3d printer.

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/n277ip/raspber...

squarefoot2• 5 years ago

I've built a couple NAS machines off Atom Mini-ITX boards, and in one case I supplied the mainboard and the two disks using a PicoPSU 12V adapter. Once the system accepts 12V, the UPS can be a car/motorcycle battery left inline as buffer, so that in case of blackout there's no switching involved. Not compact as the Helios64 UPS, but it works and is less risky than having two Lithium cells near the drives. I didn't try this configuration as my PicoPSU needed quite accurate 12V input, which the car batteries would exceed when fully charged, but their M3-ATX Automotive model accepts from 6 to 24 volts making ideal, as the name implies, for being supplied by a car battery.

Regarding the 5 bay storage, you can buy backplanes with pull out bays for 5*3.5 disks that would fit into 3*5.25 bays. A search for "3 to 5 sata backplane" returns some products.

3np4• 5 years ago

As sad as this is, I find it very refreshing with a transparent and honest update like this. I've seen so many initially promising hardware projects just fizzle out in uncertainty and radio silence.

Especially that they are open with reasons why, what they feel they could have done better, and releasing blueprints allowing others to pick up.

No doubt 2020/2021 must have been the most challenging years in decades for an indie team to launch a new hardware project like this.

I was looking quite seriously at the Kobol64 last year; the only thing that eventually made me not preorder was realizing the RAM would not be sufficient for my purposes (ZFS-backed Glusterfs nodes).

Scandiravian4• 5 years ago

I got a Helios64 with the purpose of using testing how well it would work as a storage node in my self-hosted setup

It worked okay for simple storage tasks and it's definitely great as a rpi alternative for simple setups, but not for any kind of serious cluster

I still hope that there'll one day be a RISC-V or ARM board with a 10gbe port, 4-8 SATA ports, and 32gb-64gb ram

Seems like the only option for redundancy at the hardware level for storage is refurbished server hardware or spending a lot of time on a DIY setup

3np4• 5 years ago

I'm quite happy with ASROCK RACK's X570 boards. AMD-based, 10GBe, up to 8 SATA straight from the board, up to 128GB RAM, come in both mITX and mATX variants. And they have IPMI! And an integrated super basic GPU so you can run the non-APU Ryzens without a dGPU.

If you don't enjoy DIYing too much I'd recommend the mATX ones - the form factor and cooling alternatives for the mITX are... unorthodox.

But yeah, comparable non-x86 accessible for prosumers will be years away.

CameronNemo2• 5 years ago

Does the SolidRun Honeycomb LX2 board not do what you need? It is certainly pricy ($750 without RAM, optics, a case, or drives), but powerful.

based on NXP’s outstanding 16 core LX2160A Arm Cortex A72 (2GHz) offering up to 64GB DDR4 (dual channel) and up to 40GbE.

https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/h...

LargoLasskhyfv• 5 years ago

https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/h...

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

Sad to see it end, but I appreciate the honesty.

One of the huge challenges with building niche, enthusiast hardware is that you have fewer resources than a bigger company, yet enthusiast customers tend to be far more demanding than normal. The Helios products look fantastic, but even in this HN thread you can see potential customers explaining why they wanted more out of the product (Mostly RAM). I have a feeling their fate would have been a lot of people agreeing it was a cool product but then going off and buying something else after doing some research.

ARM boards are hard right now because we’re not quite to the point of powerful, high-RAM systems being affordable, so most things are a compromise. In retrospect, I wish they would have applied their obviously fantastic product engineering skills to building an awesome NAS case first that accepted a standard Mini-ITX board. From there, they could have partnered with a Nano-ITX board vendor to offer a smaller V2, then as they picked up momentum they could branch into the custom all-in-one solution. Trying to jump straight to a full custom product from top to bottom is extremely hard, to say the least.

rjsw• 5 years ago

ARM boards are hard right now because we’re not quite to the point of powerful, high-RAM systems being affordable

I get the feeling that most ARM SoC vendors had made their first 64-bit products by just pasteing a 64-bit CPU into their previous 32-bit SoC design. It is only recently that reasonably cheap 8GB boards have become available.

CameronNemo2• 5 years ago

This reminds of an exchange I read between a Rockchip dev and a kernel maintainer. The Rockchip dev wrote the following as justification for special handling of their board:

There are many legacy IPs which only support 32bit bus, we have to use them as is in the new 64bit SoCs, I think the 32bit GIC can be considered the same as those case, can we add CONFIG_ZONE_DMA32 support in GIC driver?

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-rockchip/874kg0q6lc.wl-maz@ker...

Note that this is in regards to their new rk356x platform, which supports up to 8 GB of RAM.

gumby• 5 years ago

The business model of Mediatek, Rockchip etc is not to sell chips on a traditional merchant basis. They don't even produce data sheets. So there isn't much value for them in working on reference boards.

Their model is to qualify a customer by volume and then provide a "solution": IC with a custom linux or android on it, including undocumented drivers etc.

octopoc• 5 years ago

It seems like hardware could benefit a lot from more standardization. One of the big problems with a hardware project like this is that parts aren't fully interchangeable and therefore redesigns are necessary for minor part changes. If hardware parts were commodities instead of unique products with unique requirements, it would be a lot easier to handle supply chain disruptions.

And supply chain disruptions have been so extremely painful in the past year, why doesn't the industry do this? It seems like if you could provide guarantees about interchangeability, that translate to guarantees about availability, people would be willing to pay a premium.

dtx13• 5 years ago

The Kobol Team did a much better job than any of the other ARM Vendors with their devices. The Wiki always detailed EVERY PART of the Hardware and their devices ran mainline kernel the day i bought them. I have come to hate almost every other ARM Device because at the end of the day the software support was only good enough when the hardware was already dying of old age. It's a little easier with no GPU to support though.

That being said, Kobos never delivered quality hardware. My Helios4 died, likely the PSU, early Helios64 needed a botch job for their LAN Ports to work correctly and they never delivered on the ECC RAM needed for a NAS. Performance on the Helios4 was also absolutely crappy, never being able to deliver gigabit speeds over the LAN Port. I wish them all the best though, my personal hardware is going to be x86 for the foreseeable future unless ARM makes MAJOR strides in terms of linux compatibility

Scene_Cast2• 5 years ago

Very sad news, I was looking forward to the ECC variant.

What's the smallest ECC NAS board on the market right now?

quux• 5 years ago

That's a real shame. I have a Helios64 that has been rock solid since launch and I was thinking of getting another one if they ever became available again.

Thank you Kobol team and thank you for the openness and transparency the whole time.

ksec• 5 years ago

Cant blame them. There are no end in sight with component shortage. I mean within the NAS market, if Synology and Qnap are having trouble with supply. It is quite literally impossible to get anything done during these difficult time with the small volume they are making.

Rather than hoping or praying things will change ( it wont ), I do appreciate their honest take on the issue.

neumann• 5 years ago

Thank you Kobol team - sad to see it end, but love the candour and wish you all the best.

I ended up getting the Helios64 as it fitted both my needs pretty well and got to support an amazing project - hopefully the community can live on and help each other out!

Kobol Team Is Pulling the Plug from “Helios64 Open Source NAS”

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